This paper examines a woman's decisions about when to return to market work in the two years following childbirth and the type of child care she chooses. Own wages relate positively to an early return to work, while higher family income delays return to work. Wages and income did not...

Data from a randomized controlled trial, The RAND Health Insurance Experiment, provide the opportunity to examine whether an exogenous short-term change in the cost of medical care affects fertility in a cross-section of women. Women randomly assigned to receive free medical care for three to...

CPS data for 1979 to 1988 are used to examine the determinants of employment, actual work, and maternity leave for women in the year following childbirth. Women with better market skills (higher expected wages, older, more education) are more likely than other new mothers to have a job and to...

Using data from the Rand Health Insurance Study, which randomly assigned families into a prepaid group practice (PGP) and a fee-for-service insurance plan, this study finds different patterns of outpatient mental health care for the two groups. In the absence of cost sharing, fee-for-service...

Income distributions across American cities have remarkably different shapes. This article attempts to explain that observation. After a brief review of the income distribution literature, a theory of an area's income distribution is proposed which can account for the dissimilar shapes. The...

This article presents a theoretical and empirical discussion of how costs of outpatient medical practice vary with the size of the group providing services. It focuses upon the incentives of the individual physican to keep the costs of the practice down and his work effort high. Since cost and...

The relationship between an area's medical resources and physiological measures of individual health status is examined. Variables such as age, sex, race, education, and income are controlled for. The physiological measures include diastolic blood pressure, serum cholesterol concentration,...

We investigate the hypothesis that increasing access for the indigent to physicians' 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...