Certificate-of-Need (CON) laws restrict the quantity of health services by requiring providers to convince a government board that there is a “need” for a given service in their region. Nursing home CON regulations are the most prevalent and often the most restrictive CON regulation. This...

Many US cities implemented indoor vaccine mandates to incentivize citizens to get vaccinated and reduce the spread of COVID-19. Previous research finds that similar country-level mandates increased vaccine uptake substantially. However, with city-level mandates, unvaccinated individuals could...

During the pandemic, most nursing homes implemented isolation measures intended to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Yet, isolation has had negative mental health effects on residents. These effects were severe and could be long-lasting, and thus may raise the number of non-COVID deaths even...

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 requires employers and universities to provide accommodations to employees and students with disabilities. Previous research on the ADA has focused primarily on labor market outcomes. Yet, little is known about how the ADA affected the...

This paper explores the differences in incentives and thus behavior between for-profit and not-for-profit firms. I investigate a terrible choice nursing homes faced during the pandemic: isolate residents to prevent deaths from COVID-19 but doing so may increase total deaths by aggravating mental...

Despite Gordon Tullock’s famous effort to motivate researchers to quantify investments in rent seeking, the empirical measurement of rent-seeking activity remains under-studied. This paper proposes a new estimate of rent seeking by comparing the industrial composition of MSAs that contain a...