Economics

Health care costs in the U.S. have grown dramatically over the past several decades, with one possible cause being physicians providing unnecessary services out of fear of being sued for malpractice – a phenomenon known as “defensive medicine”. States responded by enacting different types of tort reforms. This paper reviews the literature on the effects of these tort reforms on outcomes related to malpractice risk, quantity and quality of health care services, overall utilization and expenditures, physician supply, and patient affordability. We use Google Scholar to identify papers that fall into this scope and use either associational or quasi-experimental quantitative methods. The pr..

Can citizen-led protests lead to meaningful economic redistribution and nudge governments to increase redistributive fiscal transfers? We study the effects of protests on fiscal redistribution using evidence from Nigeria. We digitized twenty-six years of public finance data from 1988 to 2016 to examine the effects of protests on intergovernmental transfers. We find that protests increase transfers to protesting regions, but only in areas that are politically aligned with disbursing governments. Evidence from the large-scale 2012 Occupy Nigeria protests confirms these results. Protesters also face increased police violence, particularly in non-aligned regions. The results show that protests c..

Colombian coca cultivation fell dramatically between 2000 and 2015, a period that saw intense U.S.-backed eradication and interdiction efforts. That progress reversed in 2015, when peace talks and legal rulings in Colombia opened enforcement gaps. Coca plantation has since increased to record levels, which coincided with a sharp rise in cocaine-related overdose deaths in the U.S. We estimate how much of that rise can be causally attributed to Colombia’s new coca boom. Leveraging the unforeseen coca supply shock and cross-county differences in pre-shock cocaine exposure, we find that the surge in supply caused an immediate rise in overdose mortality in the U.S. Our analysis estimates on the..