We explore the fiscal implications of reforms to the Canadian retirement income system by decomposing the fiscal effect of reforms into two components. The mechanical effect captures the change in the government's budget assuming no behavioral response to the reform. The second component is the...

Regular church attendance is strongly associated with a higher probability of voting. It is an open question as to whether this association, which has been confirmed in numerous surveys, is causal. We use the repeal of the laws restricting Sunday retail activity ("Blue laws") to measure the...

After steadily declining over the previous 15 years, youth smoking began to rise precipitously in 1992, and by 1997 had risen by roughly one-third from its 1991 trough. We know very little about what caused this time trend and what public policy can do to reverse it. This paper therefore...

We investigate the hypothesis that increasing access for the indigent to physician offices shifts care from hospital outpatient settings and lowers Medicaid costs (the so-called offset effect'). To evaluate this hypothesis we exploit a large increase in physician fees in the Tennessee Medicaid...

The economic argument for subsidizing charitable giving relies on the positive externalities of charitable activities, particularly from the religious institutions that are the largest recipients of giving. But the net external effects of subsidies to religious giving will also depend on a...

I consider the effects of "group-specific mandated benefits", such as mandated maternity leave, which raise the costs of employing a demographically identifiable group. The efficiency of these policies, relative to more broad-based financing of benefits expansions, will largely be a function of...

While there has been considerable discussion of the adequacy of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits as a form of income replacement, there is little evidence on the other resources that the unemployed have to finance their unemployment spells. In this paper I focus on focus on one form of...

This paper reviews the formation and outcomes of health policy making during the Clinton Administration. We begin by reviewing the state of the health economy at the dawn of the Clinton era. We then review the promise and pitfalls of the Health Security Act, and its implications for all health...

One approach to covering the uninsured that is frequently advocated by policy makers is subsidizing the employee portion of employer-provided health insurance premiums. But, since the vast majority of those offered employer-provided health insurance already take it up, such an approach is only...

Disability Insurance (DI) is a public program that provides income support to persons unable to continue work due to disability. The difficulty of defining disability, however, has raised the possibility that this program may be subsidizing the early retirement of workers who are not truly...