Previous studies find that the uninsured receive less health care than the insured, yet differences in health outcomes have rarely been studied. In addition, selection bias may partly explain the difference in care received. This paper focuses on an unexpected health shock—severe automobile accidents where victims have little choice but to visit a hospital. Another innovation is the use of a comparison group that is similar to the uninsured: those who have private health insurance but do not have automobile insurance. The medically uninsured are found to receive 20% less care and have a substantially higher mortality rate.

In recent decades, growth of world trade has been driven largely by rapid growth of trade in intermediate inputs. Much of input trade involves multinational firms locating input processing in their foreign affiliates, thereby creating global vertical production networks. We use firm-level data on U.S. multinationals to examine trade in intermediate inputs for further processing between parent firms and their foreign affiliates. Among our main findings are that demand for imported inputs is higher when affiliates face lower trade costs, lower wages for less-skilled labor, and lower corporate income tax rates.

Almost all research on the movement of stock prices on ex-dividend days has found that prices decline by less than the dividend. Though this is consistent with tax effects, several papers have argued that this phenomenon could be caused by market microstructure effects. In this paper we make use of a natural experiment that provides support for the tax explanations of ex-dividend behavior. Some closed-end funds have taxable, and some have nontaxable, dividend distributions. Both types are subject to taxes on capital gains. The implication of this for ex-dividendday price behavior is very different between these two types of funds if taxes matter. This paper demonstrates that the direction of ex-dividendday price behavior is consistent with a tax explanation and that ex-dividend-day price behavior changes, as theory would suggest, with changes in the tax law.

This paper demonstrates that mall store contracts are written to internalize externalities through both an efficient allocation and pricing of space, and an efficient allocation of incentives across stores. Certain stores generate externalities by drawing customers to other stores, whereas many stores primarily benefit from external mall traffic. Therefore, to varying degrees, the success of each store depends upon the presence and effort of other stores, and the effort of the developer to attract customers to the mall. Using a unique data set of mall tenant contracts, we show that rental contracts are written to (i) efficiently price the net externality of each store and (ii) align the incentives to induce optimal effort by the developer and each mall store according to the externality of each store's effort.

The U.S. aggregate business cycle is often characterized as a series of distinct recession and expansion phases. We apply a regime-switching model to state-level coincident indices to characterize state business cycles in this way. We find that states differ a great deal in the levels of growth that they experience in the two phases: Recession growth rates are related to industry mix, whereas expansion growth rates are related to education and age composition. Further, states differ significantly in the timing of switches between regimes, indicating large differences in the extent to which state business cycle phases are in concord with those of the aggregate economy.

We use a unique firm-level panel data set of multinational parents and their foreign affiliates to analyze whether profits are shared across borders within multinational firms. Using both fixed-effects and generalized method-of-moments estimators, affiliate wage levels are estimated to respond to both affiliate and parent profitability. The elasticity of affiliate wages to parent profits per worker is approximately 0.03, which can explain over 20 percent of the observed variation in affiliate wages. These results reveal a previously ignored aspect of labor-market rent sharing. They also reveal an important micro-level linkage with potential macro-level implications. International rent sharing can transmit economic conditions across national borders, and can thereby provide an implicit cross-country risk-sharing mechanism.

We explore the effects of temporary help employment on welfare recipients' subsequent employment and welfare dynamics. We find that any employment—in temporary help services or other sectors—yields substantial benefits compared to no employment. Although welfare recipients who go to work for temporary help service firms have lower initial wages than those with jobs in other sectors, they experience faster subsequent wage growth. Two years later, they are no less likely to be employed, their wages are close to those of other workers, and they are only slightly more likely to remain on welfare.