Historically, improvements in municipal water quality led to substantial mortality decline today’s wealthy countries. However, disinfection has not consistently produced large benefits lower-income We study this issue by analyzing a large-scale program Mexico that increased chlorination coverage urban areas from 58 percent over 90 within 18 months. estimate the reduced childhood diarrheal disea...

We study optimal dynamic lockdowns against COVID-19 within a commuting network. Our framework integrates canonical spatial epidemiology and trade models is applied to cities with varying initial viral spread: Seoul, Daegu, the New York City metropolitan area (NYM). Spatial achieve substantially smaller income losses than uniform lockdowns. In NYM Daegu—with large shocks—the lockdown restricts i...

Participants in means-tested programs must periodically document eligibility through a recertification process. If all cases that fail are ineligible, the exact timing of this process should be irrelevant. We find later interview assignments for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which leave less time to reschedule missed interviews, decrease success by 22 percent. The consequenc...

This paper considers a model of defensive medicine where doctors are imperfect agents of insured patients. A national insurer subsidises both curative and preventive medical care consumed by risk averse patients. We show that in such an environment, the optimal liability regime is similar to the no-fault systems of Sweden and New Zealand where the doctor faces zero liability. The reason is that...

The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 introduced a refundable tax credit for low-income working families who purchased health insurance coverage for their children. This health insurance tax credit (HITC) existed during tax years 1991, 1992, and 1993, and was then rescinded. We use Current Population Survey data and a difference-in-differences approach to estimate the HITC’s effect on p...

We estimate the effect of alcohol consumption on mortality using the minimum drinking age in a regression discontinuity design. We find large and immediate increases in drinking at age 21, including a 21 percent increase in recent drinking days. We also find a discrete 9 percent increase in the mortality rate at age 21, primarily due to motor vehicle accidents, alcohol-related deaths, and suici...

We combine survey responses, network data, and medical records in order to examine how friends affect the decision to get vaccinated against influenza. The random assignment of undergraduates to residential halls at a large private university generates exogenous variation in exposure to the vaccine, enabling us to credibly identify social effects. We find evidence of positive peer influences on...

I provide new evidence on the relative “powers” of contraception and abortion policy in effecting the dramatic social transformations of the 1960s and 1970s. Trends in sexual behavior suggest that young women’s increased access to the birth control pill fueled the sexual revolution, but neither these trends nor difference-in-difference estimates support the view that this also led to substantia...

This study measures the monetary value households place on preventing malaria in Tigray, Ethiopia. We estimate a household demand function for a hypothetical malaria vaccine and compute the value of preventing malaria as the household’s maximum willingness to pay to provide vaccines for all family members. This is contrasted with the traditional costs of illness (medical costs and lost producti...