Entertainment computing is central to the leisure activities of many Americans, with a remarkable array of choices now available to the average person. Video and computer games, in particular violent games, are especially popular, even with relatively young children. With this popularity, concern has been raised about possible unintended consequences of participation in interactive violence. De...

We study the impact of a merit-based incentive payment system on provider behavior in the primary care setting using experimental methods that leverage healthcare simulations with patient actors. Our approach allows us to exogenously change a provider’s incentives and to directly measure the consequences of alternative payment systems. Within our sample, we find that merit-based incentive payme...

In an experiment in non-formal schools in Indian slums, a reward scheme for attending a target number of school days increased average attendance when the scheme was in place, but had heterogeneous effects after it was removed. Among students with high baseline attendance, the incentive had no effect on attendance after it was discontinued, and test scores were unaffected. Among students with l...

I study the implications of various bankruptcy regimes for student loans on college investment, human capital accumulation, and earnings in a heterogeneous life-cycle economy with risky human capital investment. The option to discharge one’s debt under a liquidation regime helps alleviate some of the risk of investing in human capital. However, dischargeability triggers exclusion from borrowing...

Many countries are turning their attention to the use of explicit financial incentives to drive desired improvements in healthcare performance. However, we have only a weak evidence-base to inform policy in this area. The research challenge is to generate robust evidence on what financial incentives work, under what circumstances, for whom and with what intended and unintended consequences.

929 National Tax Journal Vol. LIX, No. 4 December 2006 Abstract A credit–method value–added tax, a payroll tax, and a business–level wage subsidy can approximate the economic and distributional consequences of a subtraction–method X–tax. Such a credit–method progressive consumption tax has administrative advantages as compared to a subtraction–method progressive consumption tax, once certain po...

This paper demonstrates the existence of two different kinds of externalities induced by an auditor servicing multiple clients at the same time. First, we show that the capital market price for a client can increase in the number of qualified reports that his auditor issues to his other clients, thus producing a stock price externality. Second, when the audit firm has limited wealth, an additio...

S. B. Gogia1, A. Maeder2, M. Mars3, G. Hartvigsen4, A. Basu5, P. Abbott6* 1 Society for Administration of Telemedicine and Healthcare Informatics (SATHI), New Delhi, India 2 School of Health Sciences, Flinders University, Bedford Park, Australia 3 Dept. of Telehealth, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa 4 Norwegian Centre for E-health Research & University of Tromso – The Arctic Universit...

wealth has affected how the very rules of both societies are shaped, and has created disproportionately greater opportunities for those with substantial wealth. This paper considers taxation and philanthropy as possible means for reducing inequality. In analyzing policies on taxation and philanthropy, this paper concludes that despite limitations and unintended consequences, under the current s...

This work focuses on the unintended consequences of digital transformation in the context of higher education. We use this familiar context to problematize digital transformation by first discussing the evolution of a required college course over a twenty-year period. We show how increasing digitization under resource constraint lead to a fully online delivery and we highlight three unintended ...