This paper replicates Gruber et al.’s Gruber, J., Kim, J., Mayzlin, D., 1999. Physician fees and procedure intensity: the case of cesarean delivery. Journal of Health Economics, 18 (4), 473–490 ...analysis of the effect of physician financial incentives on cesarean delivery rates, using their data, sample selection criteria, and specification. Coincident trends explain much of their estimated positive relation between fees and cesarean utilization, which also falls somewhat upon the inclusion of several childbirth observations that had been inadvertently excluded from their estimation sample. The data ultimately indicate that a $1000 increase, in current dollars, in the reimbursement for a cesarean section increases cesarean delivery rates by about one percentage point, one-quarter of the effect estimated originally.
Uncovering bias in order assignment Grant, Darren
Economic inquiry,
January 2023, 2023-01-00, 20230101, Volume:
61, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
To mitigate sequencing effects in decision‐making, many situations require a set of items to be considered in a random order. When such orderings are repeated, one can test whether randomization ...indeed obtains, or whether some orderings have been manipulated in order to achieve a favorable result. This paper articulates the key features of this problem and presents three general tests for randomness. These methods are used to analyze the order in which lottery numbers are drawn in Powerball, contestants perform on American Idol, and candidates are placed on election ballots. This last application features frequent manipulation, with potentially serious consequences.
This paper estimates how changes in family structure and women’s labor market attachment during the last fifty years have affected the incidence of cesarean delivery in the United States. Both sets ...of factors are strongly related to cesarean utilization, and have generally changed so as to increase the rate of cesarean delivery over time. Altogether, changes in these factors, complemented by demographic changes, raised the U.S. cesarean section rate by eleven percentage points since the late 1970s, nearly two-thirds of the increase over that period. Today’s elevated cesarean section rate is in part a social phenomenon.
•Employment significantly increases a mother’s chances of receiving a cesarean.•Factors associated with increased maternal employment have greatly affected U.S. cesarean rates.•Most important of these is maternal age, which has varied for causal and non-causal reasons.•The increase in U.S. cesarean rates since 1977 is, to a substantial degree, a social phenomenon.
Primary and runoff elections in Texas provide an ideal test of the ballot order hypothesis, because ballot order is randomized within each county and the state offers many counties and contests to ...analyze. Doing so for all statewide offices contested in the 2014 Democratic and Republican primaries and runoffs yields precise estimates of the ballot order effect across 24 different contests, including several not studied previously. Except for a few high-profile, high-information races, the ballot order effect is large, especially in down-ballot races for judicial positions. There, the empirical results indicate that going from last to first on the ballot raises a candidate’s vote share by nearly ten percentage points. The magnitude of this effect is not sensitive to demographic and economic factors.
•Threshold-based incentive systems have many interesting behavioral and normative properties, laid out in this paper.•Simple semiparametric and structural modeling techniques are presented that can ...be used to estimate these properties.•These methods are applied to ultramarathoners trying to complete a one hundred mile race in under twenty-four hours.•The results reveal runners’ racing strategies and mental and physical limitations.
Many public and private entities utilize incentive systems in which improvements in measured performance are rewarded only when the agent crosses some pre-specified threshold. This paper comprehensively analyzes the effects of these incentive systems on effort, the net benefits of effort, and the accuracy of information about agents’ performance, and lays out methods for estimating each. These methods are then used to reveal the motivations, physiological limits, and racing strategy of ultramarathoners trying to complete a one hundred mile race in under twenty-four hours.
This article seeks to explain the large decline in drinking and driving that occurred in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s. Using a simple measure of drinking and driving—the fraction of ...crashes involving drinking drivers—we develop a basic traffic safety model that improves estimates of drunk driving laws' effects and breaks down declines in drinking and driving into components associated with each major influence that has been identified in the literature—including unobservable “social forces.” In this decomposition, we find that the widespread enactment of seven major drunk driving laws explains only one‐fifth of the reduction in drinking and driving over this period, comparable to the effects of reduced alcohol consumption and less than those of demographic shifts and changes in social attitudes. “The Other Great Moderation” is best understood as a two‐decade movement of drinking and driving to a new steady state, led by social forces and cemented and extended by law.
•This paper develops a theoretically-based, structural method of analyzing drunk driving policy.•It can evaluate new policies or examine the influences underlying policies' effects.•It can analyze ...general features of policy or specific laws.•It shows that current U.S. policy significantly deviates from optimality.
The expected penalty for drunk driving can and does vary by blood alcohol content. This paper outlines the schedule of penalties that best achieves two key social objectives, efficacy and efficiency (subject to constraints), shows how the associated optimality conditions can be implemented with available data to analyze policy ex ante or ex post, and then uses these findings to assess four fundamental features of current U.S. drunk driving policy. Large penalties at very high alcohol concentrations are supported, but not reductions in per se blood alcohol thresholds, the most significant recent change in policy.
Analysis of 35 years of previously unstudied survey data shows how the American public evaluates the health of the macroeconomy. Survey responses are multidimensional, distinct from indexes of ...“consumer sentiment,” and based mostly on genuine perceptions of economic conditions, not media reports of economic statistics. As such, they contain unique information about current and future values of these statistics, particularly consumption growth, a longstanding focus of the literature. Both “intangibles” and macroeconomic fundamentals explain substantial variation in the survey data; the public equates 2 to 5 percentage points of inflation with 1 percentage point of unemployment. (JEL E32, E27, E01)
By 1998, all states had passed laws lowering the legal blood alcohol content for drivers under 21 to effectively zero. Theory shows these laws have ambiguous effects on overall fatalities and ...economic efficiency, and the data show they have little effect on driver behavior. A panel analysis of the 1988–2000 Fatality Analysis Reporting System indicates that zero tolerance laws have no material influence on the level of fatalities, while quantile regression reveals virtually no change in the distribution of blood alcohol content among drivers involved in fatal accidents. (JEL: I18, K32, D11)
Statistical methods are developed for assessing the likelihood of prejudicial bias in agent-assigned permutations, such as the ordering of candidates on an election ballot. The null hypothesis of an ...unbiased order assignment is represented by several forms of probabilistic exchangeability of the random orderings, while bias is represented either by compatibility with an assumed ranking of the items with respect to a hypothesized preference criterion (PC) or by linear concordance with assumed scores of the items on a PC scale. A power analysis indicates the superiority of these methods to a neutral alternative when appropriate a priori information is available; their usefulness is affirmed in an application to the ordering of candidates on 2014 Texas Republican primary election ballots. Significant evidence of bias is found in three of the five races studied, a finding that does not obtain using currently available tests.
•A priori information about bias in the ordering agents improves power.•Our Linear Concordance test is straightforward, robust, and effective.•Texas election officials failed to randomize candidate order on election ballots.
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