The reports of glomerular lesions of kidney due to tuberculosis are sparse. A 48-year-old gentleman, presented with swelling of feet of 3 months duration. As he had renal impairment, proteinuria and normal-sized kidneys, he was subjected to renal biopsy. The light microscopy and immunofluorescence revealed the diagnosis was membrano-proliferative glomerulonephritis. During hospital stay, the pa...

Taxes, Cigarette Consumption, and Smoking Intensity: Reply This paper shows that smoking intensity, i.e. the amount of nicotine extracted per cigarette smoked, responds to changes in excise taxes and tobacco prices. We exploit data covering the period 1988 to 2006 across many US states. Moreover, we provide new evidence on the importance of cotinine measures in explaining long-run smoking behav...

This paper investigates why some U.S. colleges o er positive tuition subsidies while others do not. I develop a model in which students face uncertainty in the quality of education at a school and schools in the quality of students that attend the school. These uncertainties help explain why di erent tuition subsidies exist. An empirical investigation of 1115 U.S. colleges in 1994 shows that st...

Changes in the monthly pattern of Earned Income Tax Credit disbursements over the past decade identify a large macroeconomic consumption response from EITC checks. This paper recovers a large and significant MPC out of EITC disbursements based on a comprehensive array of macroeconomic data and econometric specifications. Point estimates of the contemporaneous consumption response average 0.7 an...

This paper provides the first real-world evidence of Giffen behavior, i.e., upward sloping demand. Subsidizing the prices of dietary staples for extremely poor households in two provinces of China, we find strong evidence of Giffen behavior for rice in Hunan, and weaker evidence for wheat in Gansu. The data provide new insight into the consumption behavior of the poor, who act as though maximiz...

Individuals with health insurance use more health care. One reason is that health care is cheaper for the insured. Additionally, having insurance can encourage unhealthy behavior via moral hazard. Previous work studying the effect of health insurance on medical utilization has mostly ignored behavioral changes due to having health insurance, and how that in turn affects medical utilization. Thi...

Is financial literacy a substitute or complement for financial advice? We analyze the decision by consumers to seek financial advice in the form of credit counseling. Credit counseling is an important component of the consumer credit sector for consumers facing debt problems. Our analysis accounts for the endogeneity of an individual’s financial situation to financial literacy, and the endogene...

Introducing a concept of real, as opposed to nominal, inequality of income or wealth suggests some historical reinterpretations, buttressed by a closer look at consumption by the rich. The purchasing powers of different income classes depend on how relative prices move. The influence of relative prices on real inequality was greater in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries than in the twen...

This paper develops and applies a new estimation technique for distinguishing transitory and permanent price and income elasticities of charitable giving using panel data. Twelve-year individual averages of income and deductions are combined with information on legislated changes in tax schedules, to construct instruments for permanent price and income variation. Unlike the previous literature,...

This paper proposes that people derive utility not only from goods or their attributes as in standard models, but also from their self-image as influenced by their own perception of their preferences. In a representative survey, most respondents considered their own concern for status when purchasing a car to be minor in comparison with the status concerns of others. Similarly, most individuals...