Suchergebnisse

Public policy in modern India features affirmative action programs intended to reduce inequality that stems from a centuries-old caste structure and history of disparate treatment by gender. We study the effects of one such affirmative action program: an admissions policy that fixes percentage quotas, common across more than 200 engineering colleges, for disadvantaged castes and for women. We show that the program increases college attendance of targeted students, particularly at relatively higher-quality institutions. An important concern is that affirmative action might harm intended beneficiaries by placing them in academic programs for which they are ill-prepared. We find no evidence of such adverse impacts. (JEL O15, O17, I23, I28, J15, J16, Z13)

We study public versus private provision of health care for veterans aged 65 and older who may receive care provided by the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and in private hospitals financed by Medicare. Utilizing the ambulance design of Doyle et al. (2015), we find that the VA reduces 28-day mortality by 46 percent (4.5 per centage points) and that these survival gains are persistent. The VA also reduces 28-day spending by 21 percent and delivers strikingly different reported services relative to private hospitals. We find suggestive evidence of complementarities between continuity of care, health IT, and integrated care. (JEL H51, I11, I12, I18, J14)

Abstract
The standard model of markets for illicit drugs predicts that tougher enforcement against sellers will raise prices; yet cocaine and heroin prices have fallen substantially during a period of massive increases in enforcement. We present a model in which the basic mechanisms at work in the textbook model may be substantially altered by an important feature of illegal markets—violence that creates inheritable heterogeneity along a dimension that both determines relevant production cost and imposes externalities on other suppliers. Dealers frequently make use of violence and threat of violence in the normal course of trade. A seller who is particularly effective in the use of violence may face lower enforcement costs than other dealers and generate an external cost borne by those sellers. Together these features generate a number of counter-intuitive policy implications. For example the arrest of a particularly violent dealer reduces external costs borne by other dealers. The net effect is a possible reduction in costs for the marginal dealer and hence a reduction in price.