Suchergebnisse

Recent growth in Medicaid spending has forced states to look for ways to slow the program's rate of growth. Under the Medicaid program's rules, state governments must submit a waiver to the federal government in order to implement a cost‐saving program. The time required to process a waiver varies from 14 days to over three years. This study examines the determinants of the time it takes to process a waiver and the number of revisions required before final approval. The results indicate that an increase in the tenure of the state's delegation to the House oversight committee reduces the time to approval for Freedom of Choice waivers. However, more liberal committee members appear to delay waivers. The results complement the existing literature on the pork barrel by showing that seniority on a committee is an important determinant‐not only of monetary benefits but also of nonmonetary benefits. (JEL H51, 118)

The existing literature does not agree on the optimal jury size. We demonstrate that the probability of type I and type II errors is not sensitive to the number of jurors under the following three conditions: jurors receive independent signals about a defendant's guilt during the evidence stage of the trial; the jurors truthfully reveal their signals before deliberations begin through their votes on the first ballot; and the jury's deliberation follows a random walk. Since the opportunity cost of jury service is positive, this implies an optimal jury size of one. Adapted from the source document.

Abstract
We reexamine Mustard and Lott's controversial study on the effect of "shall-issue" gun laws on crime using an empirical standard error function randomly generated from "placebo" laws. We find that the effect of shall-issue laws on crime is much less well-estimated than the Mustard and Lott (1997) and Lott (2000) results suggest. We also find, however, that the cross equation restrictions implied by the Lott-Mustard theory are supported. A boomlet has occurred in recent years in the use of quasi-natural experiments to answer important questions of public policy. The intuitive power of this approach, however, has sometimes diverted attention from the statistical assumptions that must be made, particularly regarding standard errors. Failing to take into account serial correlation and grouped data can dramatically reduce standard errors suggesting greater certainty in effects than is actually the case. We find that the placebo law technique (Bertrand, Duflo and Mullainathan 2002) is a useful addition to the econometrician's toolkit.