One of the most important and vexing issues in health care concerns the cost to improve quality. Unfortunately, quality is difficult to measure and potentially confounded with productivity. Rather than relying on clinical or process measures, we infer quality at hospitals in greater Los Angeles...

Estimates of the returns to medical care may reflect not only the efficacy of more intensive care, but also unmeasured differences in patient severity or the productivity of health-care providers. We use a variety of instruments that are plausibly orthogonal to heterogeneity among providers as...

Small-business owners and advocates have expressed concern that liability jeopardizes the economic viability of small businesses. Yet empirical evidence concerning this issue is limited. This study assesses the impact of liability on the number of firms in a wide variety of industries dominated...

When a pharmaceutical manufacturer experiences a safety problem, the negative impact on profitability can spread to its competitors. Loss in consumer confidence, product recalls, and litigation are limited to the responsible manufacturer only if that manufacturer can be clearly linked to the...

Professional service providers who wish to organize as multi-person firms have historically been limited to the partnership form. Such organizational forms trade the benefit of risk diversification off against the costs of diluted incentives and liability exposure in choosing their optimal size....