Agricultural easement programs: Saving agriculture or saving the environment?

Saving money, saving lives.

In 1996, Duke Children's Hospital was in serious trouble. Its $11 million annual operating loss had forced administrators to make cutbacks. As a result, some caregivers felt that the quality of care had deteriorated. Parents' complaints were on the rise. Frustrated staff members were quitting. In this article, Jon Meliones, DCH's chief medical director, candidly describes how his debt-ridden ho...

Public Choices between Life-saving Programs:

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be used and cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions...

Saving lives or sustaining the public's health?

Precautionary Saving in a Markovian Earnings Environment∗

In an income fluctuation problem, an increase in future income risk (in the sense of second order stochastic dominance) is related to an increase in savings. However, until now there has been no theoretical result that confirms this relationship in Markovian earnings dynamics. This paper aims to fill this gap in the literature.

The evaluability bias in charitable giving: Saving administration costs or saving lives?

We describe the "evaluability bias": the tendency to weight the importance of an attribute in proportion to its ease of evaluation. We propose that the evaluability bias influences decision making in the context of charitable giving: people tend to have a strong preference for charities with low overhead ratios (lower administrative expenses) but not for charities with high cost-effectiveness (...