ABSTRACTMedicare adjusts its payments to physicians for geographic differences in the cost of operating a medical practice, but the method it uses is imprecise. We measure the inaccuracy in its geographic adjustment factors and categorize beneficiaries by whether they live where Medicare's...

This paper empirically analyzes how often and why individuals drop their long-term care insurance (LTCI) coverage, using data from the 2002-2008 Health and Retirement Study. It finds that over a two-year period 13% of LTCI policies lapse. It also finds that the probability of an LTCI lapse...

The objective of this article is to examine whether having health insurance reduces illness-related absenteeism among older workers. A nationally representative sample of 1780 workers in the United States, aged 52--64, are drawn from the 2004--2006 Health and Retirement Study (HRS). Binary...

The authors analyze the promotion, demotion, and turnover of pitchers in baseball's minor leagues-a labor market for which exceptionally good data on performance are available-in the years 1975-88. They find that the time between a player's assignment to one league and promotion or demotion to...

Although the proportion of lawyers who are women has grown rapidly in recent years, this study presents evidence of discrimination against women in promotion to partnership in major U.S. law firms in 1969-73 and 1980. Using regression analysis and maximum likelihood estimates of a probabilistic...

The positions taken by prosecutors and defense lawyers on proposed jury instructions on lesser-included offenses provide evidence that juries do not follow the law strictly. This paper develops a simple model of expected utility to predict how jurors make their decisions. The model explains a...