During the World War II and Korean War era, the U.S. military freely distributed cigarettes to overseas personnel and provided low-cost tobacco products on domestic military bases. In fact, even today the military continues to sell subsidized tobacco products on its bases. Using a variety of...

After forty years of school consolidation, the preponderance of the evidence, including the results presented in this paper, suggest that the race to reap returns to scale and specialization in education may have come at a high price. This paper uses newly available STAR test score data from...

Using quantile regressions, this paper provides evidence that the relationship between school quality and wages varies across points in the conditional wage distribution and educational attainment levels. Although smaller classes generally have a positive return for individuals at high...

US prison health care has recently been in the news and in the courts. A particular issue is whether prisons should contract out for health care. Contracting out has been growing over the past few decades. The stated motivation for this change ranges from a desire to improve the prison...

While the Serrano v Priest decisions and Proposition 13 effectively rendered California school district budgets exogenous, intra-district resource allocation remains largely at the discretion of school district administrations. As a result, Serrano v Priest and Proposition 13 alleviate concerns...

Most studies of the deterrence effect of incarceration treat a year in prison as having the same deterrence effect regardless of the conditions of incarceration. In contrast, we estimate both the impact of custody rate and prison location changes on female crime rates. We take advantage of the...

Needs-based capitation models have been suggested as an alternative to health-care funding methods based on historical utilization patterns. The standardized mortality ratio (SMR) applied in conjunction with an age/gender adjustment is the most widely adopted measure of relative need. This paper...

U.S Prison health care has recently been in the news and in the courts. A particular issue is whether prisons should contract out for health care. Contracting out has been growing over the past few decades. The stated motivation for this change ranges from a desire to improve the prison health...

By estimating differences in long-run education and labor market outcomes for cohorts of students exposed to differing state-level primary school retention rates, this article estimates the effects of retention on all students in a cohort, retained and promoted. We find that a 1 standard...