We studied the effect of a structured electronic communication service on health care spending, comparing doctor office and laboratory spending for a group of patients before and after the service became available to them relative to changes in a control group. In the treatment group, doctor office spending and laboratory spending fell in the period after the service became available, relative ...

Public investment can enhance productivity and promote economic growth, foster societal wellbeing, support long-term policies. Government expenditures be considered investments if they are directed towards durable assets like transport energy infrastructure, healthcare education facilities, IT systems, defence intangible such as research development. often includes purchases needed to implement...

Although perceived by candidates and parties as important in affecting political outcomes, the link between spending and success in multicandidate, multiparty election campaigns remains unproven. Not only are there relatively few studies of campaign spending effects in multiparty systems, there are none examining the effect under the Single Transferable Vote (STV) electoral system. Our study ex...

HOW BIG A ROLE THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD play in the economy is always a central issue in political debates. But measuring the size of government is not simple. People often use shorthand measures, such as the ratio of spending to gross domestic product (GDP) or of tax revenues to GDP. But those measures leave out important aspects of government action. For example, they do not capture the ways gov...

The adaptive alpha-spending algorithm incorporates additional contextual evidence (including correlations among genes) about differential expression to adjust the initial p-values to yield the alpha-spending adjusted p-values. The alpha-spending algorithm is named so because of its similarity with the alpha-spending algorithm in interim analysis of clinical trials in which stage-specific signif...

I develop a novel link between frictions in international financial markets and fiscal procyclicality. Complementing existing evidence, A decomposition of government expenditure into social spending and public good spending reveals that the cyclical correlation of social spending exhibits the biggest differences across countries. I build a small open economy model with income inequality, endoge...

Accuracy of spending-based provider performance metrics is limited by random variation and components of spending that are uncontrollable by providers. Such components vary according to the care management focus and operational maturity of each provider group. This study uses data from New Jersey Medicaid accountable care organizations (ACOs) to examine how carving out uncontrollable components...

We study the impact of campaign spending limits for candidates in Canadian federal elections. We first demonstrate that spending limits are binding mostly for incumbent candidates. We then use this information to produce endogeneity-corrected estimates for the impact of incumbent spending on electoral vote shares. Furthermore, we examine the impact of spending limits on broader measures of elec...