Suchergebnisse

Medical care represents an important component of workers' compensation benefits with the potential to improve health and post-injury labor outcomes, but little is known about the relationship between medical care spending and the labor outcomes of injured workers. We exploit the 2003–2004 California workers' compensation reforms which reduced medical spending disproportionately for workers incurring low back injuries. We link administrative claims data to earnings records for injured workers and their uninjured coworkers. We find that workers with low back injuries experienced a 7.6 percent post-reform decline in medical care, and an 8.1 percent drop in post-injury earnings relative to other injured workers. (JEL I11, I12, I13, J24, J28, J31)

The law and economics literature on suit and settlement has tended to focus on two alternative conceptual models. On the one hand, the "optimism" model of pre-trial negotiation attempts to explain settlement failure as an artifact of unfounded optimism by one or both parties. The idea that bargaining agents can adopt such non-rational biases receives support from experimental evidence. On the other hand, the "private information" model of pre-trial bargaining portrays settlement failures as an artifact of strategic information rent extraction. It finds support in some experimental evidence as well. This paper presents (for the first time) a mechanism-design approach for studying suit and settlement in the presence of both optimism and two-sided private information. We use a parameterization of our framework to generate testable comparative statics that distinguish between the two competing models, and then test these predictions using data from civil jury trials before and after the limitation on non-economic medical malpractice damages introduced by California legislation during the 1970s. Our (preliminary) results appear to be most consistent with the optimism model rather than the information model.