Raymond J. March

Institutions matter for postdisaster recovery. Conversely, natural disasters can also alter a society's institutions. Using the synthetic control method, this study examines the effects that Hurricane Katrina (2005) had on the formal and informal institutions in Louisiana. As measures of formal institutions, we employ two economic freedom scores corresponding to government employment (GE) (as a share of total employment at the state-level) and property tax (PT). These measures serve as proxies for the level of governmental interference into the economy and the protection of private property rights respectively. To assess the impact on informal institutions, we use state-level social capital data. We find that Hurricane Katrina had lasting impacts on Louisiana's formal institutions. In the post-Katrina period, we find that actual Louisiana had persistently higher economic freedom scores for both GE and PT than the synthetic …

Positive economic analysis brings tradeoffs, unintended consequences, and the role of policy in shaping individual behavior in analyzing pandemic policy responses. Welfare economics builds a set of normative recommendations about how government ought to respond to a pandemic. But there is often a divergence between what welfare economics recommends and what governments do. We call this divergence the ought-does gap. Two sources for this gap include knowledge problems and misaligned political incentives. Knowledge problems limit the set of feasible policy responses that governments can successfully administer. Misaligned incentives drive a wedge between policies that should be implemented and those that governments in fact attempt. While the paper's main argument takes a very general approach to normative analysis, we conclude with a discussion of what is missing from this approach. Government policy generally, including pandemic policy, should prioritize institutional robustness and economic growth for a wide range of reasons, public health being just one.

We examine violent conflict's spillover effects on food insecurity in Uganda, Ethiopia, and Malawi. Using a contiguity matrix weighted on the distance between housing units and data from the Living Standard Measurement Survey, we find a statistically significant spillover effect of violent conflict on food security in Ethiopia and Uganda. Statistically significant indirect effects of violent conflict on food security were negative within Malawi and positive within Ethiopia. Direct and spillover effects of violent conflicts and other covariates on food security are also analyzed.

Dr. Lester F. Soyka: E. M., a 13-year-old girl, was referred to the Massachusetts General Hospital because of uncontrolled hyper-tension. She was in apparent good health until four years ago when she had an episode of dysuria and pyuria diagnosed as cystitis and treated with Furadantin. She had two subsequent attacks three years ago and one year ago similarly treated. She seemed well until six weeks prior to admission when gross hematuria developed with no associated symptoms and no previous history of recent upper respiratory infection. Penicillin was started. In the next few days she developed headache, abdominal cramps, and anorexia. On admission to another hospital it was found that her blood pressure was 270/190, there was marked arteriolar spasm on funduscopy, and her urine was loaded with red and white blood cells with no casts. Intravenous and retrograde pyelography showed a shrunken …

Obesity in the US arguably constitutes the most significant health epidemic over the past century. Recent legislative changes allowing for recreational marijuana use further create a need to better understand the relationship between marijuana use and health choices, leading to obesity. We examine this relationship by using a synthetic control approach to examine the impact of legalized recreational marijuana access on obesity rates by comparing Washington State to a synthetically constructed counterfactual. We find that recreational marijuana's introduction did not lead to increased obesity rates and may have led to decreases in obesity.

(Holshue et al. 2020). COVID-19 infections from travel and community spread quickly spread throughout the country (World Health Organization 2020). By early May, Johns Hopkins University and the Medicine Coronavirus Resource Center (2020) estimated that more than 1,735,000 US citizens had contracted COVID-19, resulting in approximately 103,000 fatalities. Both figures constituted the most cases and fatalities of any nation affected by the virus (Gupta et al. 2020). To slow the spread of infection and prevent the US health-care sector from becoming overwhelmed with new COVID-19 cases, governments at all levels implemented numerous restrictive measures on personal conduct and economic activity (Gupta et al. 2020; Hale et al. 2020). Among the most restrictive measures were mandated stay-at-home orders. At their peak, stay-at-home rules prohibited approximately 94 percent of the US population from …

From the end of the Civil War to the onset of the Great War, the United States experienced an unprecedented increase in commitment rates for mental asylums. Historians and sociologists often explain this increase by noting that public sentiment called for widespread involuntary institutionalization to avoid the supposed threat of insanity to social well-being. However, that explanation neglects expanding rent seeking within psychiatry and the broader medical field over the same period. In this paper, we argue that stronger political influence from mental healthcare providers contributed significantly to the rise in institutionalization. We test our claim empirically with reference to the catalog of medical regulations from 1870 to 1910, as well as primary sources documenting rates of insanity at the state level. Our findings provide an alternative explanation for the historical rise in US institutionalizations.

This article utilizes a political economy framework to examine how FDA regulations impacted the U.S. healthcare sector's ability to address COVID‐19. I specifically examine the developing COVID‐19 testing, the approval of the medication remdesivir, and COVID‐19 vaccines. By examining periods before and after the FDA issued Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs), my analysis finds that the FDA's regulations enacted before the COVID‐19 pandemic began strongly restricted clinician and patient access to COVID‐19 testing, remdesivir treatment, and approving vaccines. After the FDA issued EUAs, the healthcare sector quickly adopted COVID‐19 testing and remdesivir with little evidence of negative consequences. These findings contribute to the economics literature examining the FDA and contemporary COVID‐19 policy research.

This paper analyzes the Peruvian highland tradition of Takanakuy, a public brawling ritual occurring each Christmas to resolve conflicts between local community members. We argue that Takanakuy provides an effective way for locals to resolve disputes that Peru's formal judicial system is unable or unwilling to settle. Using insights from ethnographic fieldwork, journalistic articles, reports, and academic sources, we find that brawling during Takanakuy encourages social cooperation by preventing potential violence and offering community members a credible mechanism of law enforcement in an orderly fashion with social acceptance.

We developed an expensiveness index and used the Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey data set to examine empirically whether Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participants pay higher prices compared with nonqualifying and qualifying, but nonparticipating, households. Purchasers’ ability to minimize food expenditures has significant effects on the program’s effectiveness and on participants’ food security. Using ordinary least squares and two techniques that control for the endogeneity of SNAP participation, we found no significant effect of SNAP participation on food prices. Moreover, we found that SNAP participants pay, on average, lower prices than do nonparticipants. We conclude by providing suggestions for policy improvements and implications for future research.

Incentives affect the ways in which scientific research is disseminated and translated into practice. From 1936 to 1972, approximately fifty thousand lobotomies were performed in the US, with the majority occurring during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Curiously, the lobotomy's popularity coincided with a consensus within the medical community that the procedure was ineffective. To explain this paradox, we follow the framework developed by Tullock (2005) to examine how financial incentives within the scientific community affected how scientific research is used in practice. We argue that government funding for public mental hospitals and asylums expanded and prolonged the use of the lobotomy, despite mounting scientific evidence. We demonstrate that the lobotomy was used less in private mental hospitals and asylums. This paper provides an explanation for the use of scientifically discredited procedures due …