Mortality Risks, Health Endowments, and Parental Investments in Infancy: Evidence from Rural India

This paper examines whether increased background mortality risks induce households to make differential health investments in their high- versus low-endowment children. We argue that increases in background mortality risks may disproportionately affect the survival of the low-endowment sibling, consequently increasing the mortality gap between the high- and low-endowment siblings. This increase in mortality gap may induce households to investment more in their high endowment children. We test this hypothesis using nationally representative data from rural India. We use birth size as a measure of initial health endowment, immunization & breastfeeding as measures of childhood investments and infant mortality rate in the child’s village as a measure of mortality risks. We find that in villages with high mortality risks, small-at-birth children in a family are 6 - 17 percent less likely to be breastfed or immunized compared to their large-at-birth siblings. In contrast, we find no significant within family differences in investments in villages with low mortality risks.

Paying More for Primary Care: Can It Help Bend the Medicare Cost Curve?

Estimates how a permanent 10 percent increase in Medicare fees for primary care ambulatory visits would affect the number and cost of visits and spending for inpatient and post-acute care. Considers primary care's role in bending the Medicare cost curve

Evaluation of the Transitional Care Model

This project is a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) of the Transitional Care Model, a nurse-led hospital discharge and home follow-up program for chronically ill older adults, aimed at preventing health complications and re-hospitalizations

How Much Is Too Much? An Analysis of Health Plan Profits and Administrative Costs in California

Examines the potential impact of proposals to control the rise of health insurance premiums by restraining the administrative costs and profits of plans. Looks at other states' regulations and implications for design, implementation, and monitoring

The Short and Long Run Effects of Daylight Saving Time on Fatal Automobile Crashes

Prior literature suggests that Daylight Saving Time (DST) can both increase the risk of automobile crashes in the short run and decrease the risk of automobile crashes in the long run. We use 28 years (1976-2003) of automobile crash data from the United States, and exploit a natural experiment arising from a 1986 federal law that changed the time when states switched to DST to identify the short run and long run effects of DST on automobile crashes. Our findings suggest that (1) DST has no significant detrimental effect on automobile crashes in the short run; (2) DST significantly reduces automobile crashes in the long run with a 8-11% fall in crashes involving pedestrians, and a 6-10% fall in crashes for vehicular occupants in the weeks after the spring shift to DST.

Prioritizing Educational Investments in Children in the Developing World

The authors bring together 40 randomized and non-randomized evaluations of education programs to compare cost-effectiveness, seeking to facilitate prioritization of different candidate interventions by policymakers. They examine cost-effectiveness across three outcomes (enrollment, attendance, and test scores) and find distinct "best interventions" for each outcome. For increasing enrollment, urban fellowships, school consolidation, and extra teachers have proven most cost effective. For school attendance, school-based deworming stands out as most cost effective. And for improving test scores, several interventions seem similarly cost effective, including providing blackboards, workbooks, training teachers, and others. They discuss some of the challenges inherent to comparing interventions.education, cost-effectiveness