It is common to model costs of carrying out strategies in games in relation to the complexity, in some sense, of the strategies. We show a particularly general definition of complexity for this purpose, one that subsumes many alternatives as special cases. We explore how this definition can be...

Despite a strong interest in entrepreneurship, economists have devoted little attention to the role of health insurance availability. I investigate the impact of a unique policy experiment - New Jersey's Individual Health Coverage Plan - on self-employment. Implemented in August 1993, the IHCP...

The special legal status of Indian tribes in the U.S. means that state excise taxes are not necessarily collected on cigarette purchases on Indian reservations. We focus on two under-studied but basic empirical economic questions this raises. Using novel data from New York surveys that asked...

Econometric estimates of the responsiveness of health-related consumer demand to higher prices are often key ingredients for policy analysis. Drawing on several examples, especially that of cigarette demand, we review the potential advantages and challenges of synthesizing econometric evidence...

We conduct an applied welfare economics analysis of cigarette tax avoidance. We develop an extension of the standard formula for the optimal Pigouvian corrective tax to incorporate the possibility that consumers avoid the tax by making purchases in nearby lower tax jurisdictions. To provide a...

We conduct an empirical study of the impact of consumer price search on the shifting of cigarette excise taxes to consumer prices. We use novel data on the prices that smokers report paying and document substantial price dispersion. We find that cigarette taxes are shifted at lower rates to...

ABSTRACT This study exploits a natural experiment in the province of Ontario, Canada, to identify the impact of pay‐for‐performance (P4P) incentives on the provision of targeted primary care services and whether physicians' responses differ by age, size of patient population, and baseline...

Policy makers continue to advocate and adopt cigarette taxes as a public health measure. Most previous individual-level empirical studies of cigarette demand are essentially static analyses. In this study, we use longitudinal data to examine the dynamics of young adults' decisions about smoking...