Why intended consequences?

Food Aid’s Intended and Unintended Consequences

This paper surveys the existing empirical evidence on the unintended consequences of food aid. Micro-level evidence is presented on the impacts of food aid deliveries on household labour supply, production incentives, consumption patterns and natural resource use. At the meso-level, evidence on the impact of food aid on market development, market prices, informal insurance arrangements, and the...

Intended and Unintended Consequences of Prison Reform∗

Since the 1970s, U.S. federal courts have issued court orders condemning state prison crowding. However, the impact of these court orders on prison spending and prison conditions is theoretically ambiguous because it is unclear if these court orders are enforceable. We examine states’ responses to court interventions and show that these interventions generate higher per inmate incarceration cos...

Why do People Prefer Historically Intended Functions?

When presented with a hammer that is being used as a paperweight, most people judge that its proper function is to pound nails in place rather than to hold down pieces of paper. The bias to assign proper function based on historically intended function rather than on manifest or current function, can be explained as a memory effect (we have learned that hammers are used to pound nails), as abdu...

DRG-based hospital payment: Intended and unintended consequences

The intended and unintended consequences of performance monitoring in colonoscopy

Performance measurement is now routine in many areas of medicine and is relatively easy to apply to colonoscopy practice as there are several variables that can be quantified. The oldest and universally reported performance indicator is the cecal intubation rate (CIR). It is globally agreed that the standard for cecal intubation should be at least 90%, which is to say that the endoscopist shoul...