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Between 1973 and 2003, abortion providers in the United States were the targets of over 300 acts of extreme violence. Using unique data on attacks and on abortions, abortion providers, and births, we examine how anti-abortion violence has affected providers' decisions to perform abortions and women's decisions about whether and where to terminate a pregnancy. We find that clinic violence reduces abortion services in targeted areas. Once travel is taken into account, however, the overall effect of the violence is much smaller.

Zonder onderwerpscode: economie

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We examine the impact of educational attainment on fertility and mating market outcomes. Using a regression discontinuity design, we exploit an extension of the compulsory schooling age from 15 to 16 in 1972 in the UK. The change was binding for a quarter of the population. Simple plots of the raw data show substantially lower teen fertility rates across the threshold of the reform, but no impacts on abortions and no impact on completed fertility by age 45. In the mating market, the reform induced both men and women to marry more educated mates, consistent with positive assortative mating. We show that timing of the teen fertility reduction coincided with the timing of the extra induced schooling and that the probability of marrying a peer in the same academic cohort rose. These results suggest that school attendance may have important direct effects, in addition to and separate from the human capital effects of education.

Zonder onderwerpscode: economie

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Between 2011 and 2014, Texas enacted three pieces of legislation that significantly reduced funding for family planning services and increased restrictions on abortion clinic operations. Together this legislation creates cross-county variation in access to abortion and family planning services, which we leverage to understand the impact of family planning and abortion clinic access on abortions, births, and contraceptive purchases. In-state abortions fell 20% and births rose 3% in counties that no longer had an abortion provider within 50 miles. Births increased 1% and contraceptive purchases rose 8% in counties without a publicly-funded family planning clinic within 25 miles.

Zonder onderwerpscode: economie

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Rapidly growing health-care costs have fueled interest in using financial incentives to improve health behaviors. Most of the research on financial incentives outside of clinical studies has been observational, limiting our ability to make causal inferences on their effectiveness. The few carefully-designed studies have generally found little lasting effect on behavior after the incentive program ended. We report on a large field experiment with employees of a Fortune 500 company which offered incentives for using the company gym. In addition to understanding the effects of incentives alone, we investigate a novel approach to generate lasting behavior change using self-funded commitment contracts. At the end of incentive period, half of the incentive group were offered the opportunity to create a self-funded commitment contract to motivate their own behavior. Workers responded strongly during the incentive period, doubling their rate of use of the company gym. After the incentive period ended, we find that those offered incentives only continued to attend at higher rates, but the effect was quite modest in magnitude. The availability of a commitment contract, however, substantially improved the long-run effects of the incentive program both during the commitment period and well beyond, offering a promising new approach to increasing the long-run effect of incentive programs.

Zonder onderwerpscode: economie