The joint presence of technological change and consumption externalities is central to health care industries around the world, because medical innovation drives the expansion of the health care sector and altruism seems to motivate many public subsidies. Although traditional economic analysis...

Communicable diseases pose a formidable challenge for public policy. Using numerical simulations, we show under which scenarios a monopolist's price and prevalence paths converge to a non-zero steady state. In contrast, a planner typically eradicates the disease. If eradication is impossible,...

In a rational choice model of parole release, a color-blind parole board seeking to minimize violations would release all prisoners below a certain risk threshold. To test this prediction, we extend the outcome-test methodology used in assessing discrimination in police searches. We overcome the...

Whether siblings of specific birth order perform differently has been a longstanding open empirical question. We use the family tree structure of the PSID to examine two claims found in the literature: whether being early in the birth order implies a distinct educational advantage, and whether...

We examine the implications of being early in the birth order, and whether a pattern exists within large families of falling then rising attainment with respect to birth order. Unlike other studies using U.S. data, we go beyond grade for age and look at racial differences. Drawing from OLS and...

This paper studies the impact of antiretroviral therapies (ARVs) on HIV testing and risky sexual behavior. I use data collected in San Francisco among a high-risk population from 1994 to 2002. The evidence supports the hypothesis of a causal link between the introduction of ARVs in late 1996 and...

We examine how the rising incarceration of Black men and the sex ratio imbalance it induces shapes young Black women’s behavior during their late teens and early twenties. Combining data from the BJS and the CPS to match incarceration rates with individual observations, we show that Black male...

This paper investigates the impact of no-fault divorce laws on marriage and divorce in the United States. I propose a theory that captures the key stylized facts of the rising then declining divorce rates and the apparent convergence of divorce rates across the different divorce regimes. The...

Communicable diseases pose a formidable challenge for public policy. Using numerical simulations, we show under which scenarios a monopolist’s price and prevalence paths converge to a nonzero steady-state. In contrast, a planner typically eradicates the disease. If eradication is impossible,...

This article explores key insights that economic theory can shed on the issue of no-fault divorce in the United States, addressing modifications in the incentive structure of individuals that resulted from the legislative reforms of the 1970s. After stressing the importance of correctly...