This report addresses a deceptively simple question: How can the productivity of American health care be substantially improved? Productivity, in lay terms, is the ratio of output to inputs. A more colloquial rendition of the question might be: how can we get a lot more bang for our health care...

The United States economy is struggling to recover from its worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. After several huge doses of conventional macroeconomic stimulus - deficit-spending and monetary stimulus - policymakers are understandably eager to find innovative no-cost ways of...

In 2007, nearly 60 percent of all Federal individual tax returns were filed electronically, about three times the proportion 10 years earlier. Because electronic filing is both more efficient and more accurate than filing by mail, it generates substantial savings for taxpayers: The Internal...

In this study, we analyze the consumer welfare implications of regulating Rent-to-Own (RTO) transactions. We conclude that the benefits and costs of mandatory disclosure and labeling regulations currently imposed by most states are likely small, and that the effects of imposing a Federal...

This paper uses the standard economic framework for designing government regulations to evaluate the Federal Reserve Board's proposed cost-based price caps for debit card interchange fees. We argue that the Board has not prepared an economically sound diagnosis of the problem that it is trying...

Network neutrality is a policy proposal that would regulate how network providers manage and price the use of their networks. Congress has introduced several bills on network neutrality. Proposed legislation generally would mandate that Internet service providers exercise no control over the...

In the authors' shared opinion, the economic evidence does not support the regulations proposed in the Commission's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking Regarding Preserving the Open Internet and Broadband Industry Practices (the “NPRM”). To the contrary, the economic evidence provides no support...

A quarter century ago, there was a very influential paper that shaped thinking on how best to design what we now call the Internet. The article offered a design principle called "end-to-end." The idea was to keep the inner part of a computer network as simple as possible and allow the...