When considering federal legislation to encourage states to raise the drinking age to twenty-one, public officials faced a common problem: assessing the efficacy of a proposed policy change from evidence that is deficient in quality and quantity. These deficiencies mandated a discerning...

We show that the dynamics of drinking and driving can be adequately described using a simple measure: the fraction of accidents involving drinking drivers. Using this measure, we develop a basic traffic safety model that improves estimates of drunk driving laws’ effects and breaks down...

Many public and private entities utilize incentive systems in which improvements in measured performance are rewarded only when the agent crosses some pre-specified threshold. This paper comprehensively analyzes the effects of these incentive systems on effort, the net benefits of effort, and...

We determine the degree to which observed student performance in microeconomics principles can be attributed, inferentially, to three kinds of student academic productivity, the instructor, demographics, and unmeasurables. The empirical approach utilizes an ordered probit model that relates...

This paper documents a large educational gradient in traffic fatality rates and investigates its source. Compared to individuals with a college education, those with at most a high school diploma are more than four times as likely to die in a traffic accident, a gradient exceeding that for...

Dramatic changes in the U.S. macroeconomy accompanied the Covid-19 pandemic, with large swings in economic growth, unemployment, and inflation. The American public’s perception of macroeconomic conditions varied as well, in seemingly-perplexing ways. In order to document this phenomenon and...

This paper descriptively assesses the discipline of physicians by state medical boards, drawing on an extensive nationwide database of sanctions delivered during the period 1994-2002. We identify the frequency and severity of disciplinary actions, the offenses leading to actions, and the degree...

Using a statistical model and a partial equilibrium economic search model, we develop a methodology for appraising the value of consumer information about the quality of health care providers and apply it to information about physicians' predispositions to perform cesarean section deliveries....

Statistical methods are developed for assessing the likelihood of prejudicial bias in agent-assigned permutations, such as the ordering of candidates on an election ballot. The null hypothesis of an unbiased order assignment is represented by several forms of probabilistic exchangeability of the...

This paper examines how grade incentives affect student learning across a variety of courses at two universities, using for identification the discrete rewards offered by the standard A-F letter grade system. We develop five predictions about effort provision in the presence of the thresholds...