Malpractice reforms tend to reduce physician liability for harming patients. Because these reforms are passed at the state level, the costs of harming patients vary widely by geographic location. In this paper, I test whether malpractice reforms affect where physicians choose to practice and whether physicians who relocate in response to reforms are particularly prone to commit malpractice. Bec...

Businesses and pro-business interest groups have often claimed that the litigation environment in the states influences their decisions about where and how to do business. However, very little empirical evidence exists to suggest that these claims are anything more than anecdotal. This study attempts to fill that void. I employ a triple-differences identification strategy in which businesses in...

Capitalizing on the most recent estimates of agricultural border protection in China and in other countries, this paper assesses the economic and poverty impact of global trade reform in China. It also examines the interplay between the trade reforms and factor market reforms aimed at improving the allocation of labor within the Chinese economy. The results suggest that trade reforms in the res...

We estimate the effect of pension reforms on households’ expectations of retirement outcomes and wealth accumulation decisions exploiting a decade of pension reforms as a source of exogenous variation in expected pension wealth. Two parameters are crucial to estimate pension wealth: the age at which workers expect to retire and the expected ratio of pension benefits to pre-retirement income. Th...

Structural reforms that increase competition in product and labor markets may have large effects on the long-run level of output. We find that, in a medium scale DSGE model, a 10 percent reduction in product and labor markups increases output by nearly 7 percent after 5 years. The short-run transmission of these reforms, however, depends critically on the presence of the zero lower bound (ZLB)....

Abstract: The policy reforms in Moroccan agriculture brought about through the process of structural and sectoral adjustment and the engagements undertaken by Morocco in the context of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) represent important milestones in Moroccan agricultural history. Since 1985, reforms have been undertaken, especially with respect to domestic agricultural market...

Explanations for the decline of partisanship in the early part of the 20th century are at odds. The received wisdom holds that a set of electoral reforms led Congressmen to break their partisan ties, engaging in more familiar modes of personalistic behavior. This view has recently been challenged noting that the bulk of the reforms passed in the Populist and Progressive periods eliminated facti...

This paper evaluates the impact of six different types of tort reforms on the frequency, size, and number of total annual settlements in medical malpractice cases between 1991 and 1998. Medical malpractice data come from the National Practitioner Data Bank, which contains more than 100,000 malpractice settlement payments in the study time frame. Of the six tort reforms examined, two reforms (ca...

The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, is to provide an empirical analysis of the implementation of economic reforms in the areas of privatization, trade liberalization, and public expenditure priorities, using the Washington Consensus guidelines. Second, is to assess to continued viability of the Washington Consensus as a model for developing economies. The two methodologies used in thi...

Industrial sector plays a vital role in the development of Indian economy because they can solve the problems of general poverty, unemployment, backwardness, low production, low productivity and low standard of living etc. The Indian Government had undertaken policy reforms since 1980, but the most radical reforms have occurred since 1991, after the severe economic crisis in fiscal year 1990-91...