In this study we examine the experience of a single large hospital with an informal pre-litigation "complaint" process that resolves some cases outside of the legal system. The empirical results are generally consistent with an information structure where patients are poorly informed about the...

The growth of medical malpractice liability costs has the potential to affect the delivery of health care in the U.S. along two dimensions. If growth in malpractice payments results in higher malpractice insurance premiums for physicians, these premiums may affect the size and composition of the...

Whereas the literature evaluating the effect of tort reforms has focused on reported incurred losses, this paper examines the long run effects using a comprehensive sample by state of individual firms writing medical malpractice insurance from 1984-2003. The long run effects of reforms are...

We provide a comparison of salient organizational features of primary markets for foreign government debt over the very long run. We focus on output, quality control, information provision, competition, pricing, charging, and signaling. We find that the market setup experienced a radical...

Minimum asset and liability insurance requirements must often be met in order for parties to participate in potentially harmful activities. Such financial responsibility requirements may improve parties' decisions whether to engage in harmful activities and, if so, their efforts to reduce risk....

A liquidity-constrained entrepreneur needs to raise capital to finance a business activity that may cause injuries to third parties -- the tort victims. Taking the level of borrowing as fixed, the entrepreneur finances the activity with senior (secured) debt in order to shield assets from the...

We show that an occupational license serves as a job market signal, similar to education in the Spence model. In the presence of occupational licensing, we find evidence that firms rely less on observable characteristics such as race and gender in determining employee wages. As a result,...

This paper reports on a household survey specially designed to measure what we call the "offshorability" of jobs, defined as the ability to perform the work duties from abroad. We develop multiple measures of offshorability, using both self-reporting and professional coders. All the measures...