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...

While the literature on the Americans with Disabilities Act’s (A.D.A.) impact on economic outcomes for disabled Americans has focused by and large on employment and wages, the literature on disabled Americans’ accumulation of human capital because of the ADA’s protections has been largely...

Is capitalism a necessary condition for political freedom? Friedrich Hayek argued that capitalism is necessary for political freedom in what is now known as the Hayek-Friedman Hypothesis. While previous empirical work using economic freedom as a proxy for capitalism has somewhat confirmed the...

Is a monopolized banking sector a threat to democracy? While Oskar Lange and Abba Lerner (1944) recognized that socialism was a threat to democracy, they also held that a tendency towards banking sector monopolization under capitalism would undermine democracy through the inevitable...

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...

Most of the world's population lives in countries that ban the self-service sale of gasoline. Causal effects of this regulation can hardly be assessed in these countries due to a lack of policy changes, but a recent quasi-experiment in the state of Oregon allows us to analyze the impact of the...

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...