This short paper estimates the state and local fiscal benefits of the Nurse Family Partnership (NFP) program. NFP provides nurse home visiting services to low-income first-time mothers. In addition to social benefits, NFP provides state and local fiscal benefits by reducing costs of social services, welfare, and crime, and increasing tax receipts due to increased earnings of mothers and former ...

The International Migration of Health Professionals Health workforce shortages in developed countries are perceived to be central drivers of health professionals’ international migration, one ramification being negative impacts on developing nations’ healthcare delivery. After a descriptive international overview, selected economic issues are discussed for developed and developing countries. He...

This paper provides new estimates of the effect of household gun prevalence on homicide rates, and infers the marginal external cost of handgun ownership. The estimates utilize a superior proxy for gun prevalence, the percentage of suicides committed with a gun, which we validate. Using countyand state-level panels for 20 years, we estimate the elasticity of homicide with respect to gun prevale...

Medicaid programs increasingly finance competing, capitated managed care plans rather than administering fee-for-service (FFS) programs. We study how the transition from FFS to managed care affects highand low-cost infants (blacks and Hispanics, respectively). We find that blackHispanic disparities widen—e.g., black mortality and pre-term birth rates increase by 15% and 7%, respectively, while ...

I consider the problem of evaluating the effect of a health care reform on the demand for doctor visits when the effect is potentially different in different parts of the outcome distribution. Quantile regression is a useful technique for studying such heterogeneous treatment effects. Recent progree has been made to extend such methods to applications with a count dependent variable. An analysi...

A theoretical model of the ethical preferences of individuals is tested by conducting a choice experiment on safety-enhancing road investments. The relative value of a saved life is found to decrease with age, such that the present value of a saved year of life is almost independent of age at a pure rate of time preference of a few percent, and a saved car driver is valued 17-31% lower than a p...

In this paper, we propose a decision framework where people are individually asked either to consent actively to or reject some pro-social behavior. We hypothesize that confronting individuals with the choice of engaging in a specific pro-social behavior contributes to the formation of issue-specific altruistic preferences while simultaneously involving a commitment. The hypothesis is tested in...

We identify the rate of off-label use of prescription drugs in the United States during 1993-2008. We apply Detection Controlled Estimation to a comprehensive crosssection of prescriptions and find that rates of off-label use rise from 30.2% to 39.1% during this period. This coincides with a surge in settlements of Department of Justice lawsuits for off-label marketing. Additionally, physicians...

The economics of happiness is applied to further the understanding of important consumption decisions in which limited willpower is often argued to lead to suboptimal choices. Based on individuals’ judgments of the quality of their lives, it is, in principle, possible to derive whether some observed behavior is suboptimal and is therefore reducing a person’s welfare. We discuss the key characte...

Quality-of-care issues in the US dialysis industry have led to proposals to proscribe physician ownership of these facilities. The logic behind this approach relates to a profits/quality tradeoff created by the existing reimbursement structure. Given that tradeoff, separating ownership from quality-of-care decision making ostensibly could improve performance. Our empirical results, however, do ...