Despite the prominent role that information plays in the economic theory of credit markets, no direct evidence exists on the causal relationship between the availability of information about loan applicants and loan performance. This paper provides such evidence by exploiting an unanticipated change in the amount of information visible in an online market for loans to measure the impact of lender information on loan outcomes. Conditional on data available in both periods, allowing lenders to access more borrower credit information substantially reduced default rates among high-risk borrowers by 17percentage points on average but had almost no effect on low-risk borrowers. Immediate lender returns increased by about 12percentage points and took 5weeks to decay. Among high-risk loans, returns converged within credit grade bins. Using panel information on lenders, I find that the information improved loan performance in two ways: first, it significantly improved the screening performed by lenders already active on the website. Second, it attracted new lenders who were better at screening loan applicants and earned higher returns. I test whether the reform resulted in selection among loan applicants using data that is unobserved by lenders in both periods. I find that there was no change in unobserved credit quality among loan applicants, but that the information improved lenders’ ability to select the (unobservably) higher quality borrowers from the pool of applicants. I also find suggestive evidence that lenders’ beliefs about loan applicants, as measured by the minimum interest rate at which they were willing to lend, converged.

In 2006 Massachusetts enacted a major health care reform aimed at achieving near-universal coverage in the state. While other studies have found that this reform substantially affected the use of health services in general, the impact of the reform on children is largely unexplored. Children are of special interest to policymakers because it is widely believed that better health in early childhood results in large payoffs to adult health and achievement. I analyze how the reform affected the insurance coverage, health care utilization patterns, and health outcomes of children under 18 years old.

This paper isolates the causal impact of neighborhood environment on the credit outcomes of low-income borrowers by analyzing the participants of the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment. MTO was a unique, large-scale experiment that offered families vouchers to move to better neighborhoods via randomized lottery. We find higher credit scores and use among those required to move to the lowest poverty areas as young children. For those who moved as adults, we find that better neighborhoods lead to a reduction of overdue debts and delinquencies, but only among those given unrestricted neighborhood choice.

We study the causal impacts of income on a rich array of employment outcomes, leveraging an experiment in which 1,000 low-income individuals were randomized into receiving $1,000 per month unconditionally for three years, with a control group of 2,000 participants receiving $50/month. We gather detailed survey data, administrative records, and data from a mobile phone app. The transfer caused total individual income excluding the transfers to fall by about $1,900/year relative to the control group and a 4.2 percentage point decrease in labor market participation. Participants reduced their work hours as a result of the transfers by 1-2 hours/week and participants’ partners reduced their work hours by a comparable amount. Among other categories of time use, the greatest increase generated by the transfer was in time spent on leisure. Despite asking detailed questions about amenities, we find no impact on quality of employment, and our confidence intervals can rule out even small improvements. Treated participants broadly increase expenditures, led by spending on non-durable goods and services, with smaller increases in spending on durable goods and human capital. We observe no significant effects on degree attainment, though the magnitudes of the estimated effects generally appear larger among younger participants. Measures of subjective well-being are higher among treated participants in the first year of the transfers but then revert to control group levels. Overall, our results suggest a moderate labor supply effect that does not appear offset by other productive activities.

Those involved with the criminal justice system have disproportionately high rates of mental illness and substance-use disorders, prompting speculation that health insurance, by improving treatment of these conditions, could reduce crime. Using the 2008 Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, which randomly made some low-income adults eligible to apply for Medicaid, we find no statistically significant impact of Medicaid coverage on criminal charges or convictions. These null effects persist for high-risk subgroups, such as those with prior criminal cases and convictions or mental health conditions. In the full sample, our confidence intervals can rule out most quasi-experimental estimates of Medicaid’s crime-reducing impact.

We use large-scale federal survey data linked to administrative death records to investigate the relationship between Medicaid enrollment and mortality. Our analysis compares changes in mortality for near-elderly adults in states with and without Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansions. We identify adults most likely to benefit using survey information on socioeconomic status, citizenship status, and public program participation. We find that prior to the ACA expansions, mortality rates across expansion and nonexpansion states trended similarly, but beginning in the first year of the policy, there were significant reductions in mortality in states that opted to expand relative to nonexpanders. Individuals in expansion states experienced a 0.132 percentage point decline in annual mortality, a 9.4% reduction over the sample mean, as a result of the Medicaid expansions. The effect is driven by a reduction in disease-related deaths and grows over time. A variety of alternative specifications, methods of inference, placebo tests, and sample definitions confirm our main result.

Exploiting a discontinuity in childhood Medicaid eligibility based on date of birth, we find that more years of childhood eligibility are associated with fewer hospitalizations in adulthood. For blacks, we find a 7% to 15% decrease in hospitalizations and a suggestive 2% to 5% decrease in emergency department visits, but no similar effect for nonblacks. The effects are pronounced for utilization related to chronic illnesses and for patients living in low-income postal codes. Calculations suggest that lower rates of hospitalizations during one year in adulthood for blacks offset between 2% and 4% of the initial costs of expanding Medicaid for all children.

We use linked administrative data on the universe of California births to provide novel evidence on economic inequality in infant and maternal health. Infants and mothers at the top of the income distribution have worse birth and morbidity outcomes than their lowest-income counterparts, but are nevertheless the least likely to die in the year following birth. Racial disparities swamp these income disparities, with no racial convergence in health outcomes as income rises. A comparison with Sweden shows that infant and maternal health is worse in California at virtually all income levels.

We examine multi-generational impacts of positive in utero health interventions using a new research design that exploits sharp increases in prenatal Medicaid eligibility that occurred in some states. Our analyses are based on U.S. Vital Statistics Natality files, which enables linkages between individuals' early life Medicaid exposure and the next generation's health at birth. We find evidence that the health benefits associated with treated generations' early life program exposure extend to later offspring. Our results suggest that the returns on early life health investments may be substantively underestimated.

The Supplemental Security Income program uses a birth weight cutoff at 1,200 grams to determine eligibility. Using birth certificates linked to administrative records, we find low-income families of infants born just below the cutoff receive higher monthly cash benefits (equal to 27 percent of family income) at ages 0–2 with smaller benefits continuing through age 10. Yet we detect no improvements in health care use and mortality in infancy, nor in health and human capital outcomes as observed through young adulthood for these infants. We also find no improvements for their older siblings.