Domestic violence imposes a large cost on society. The authors exploit state variation in timing to examine the impact of three types of law on intimate partner homicides. These laws restrict access to firearms by individuals who are subject to a restraining order or have been convicted of a domestic violence misdemeanor or allow law enforcement officers to confiscate firearms at a domestic violence scene. The authors find that female intimate partner homicide rates decline 7% after a state passes a restraining order law. They find no effect from the domestic violence misdemeanor or confiscation laws.

One out of six Americans under age sixty-five lacks health insurance, a situation that imposes sizable hidden costs upon society. The poorer health and shorter lives of those without coverage account for most of these costs. Other impacts are manifested by Medicare and disability support payments, demands on the public health infrastructure, and losses of local health service capacity. We conclude that the estimated value of health forgone each year because of uninsurance (dollars 65-dollars 130 billion) constitutes a lower-bound estimate of economic losses resulting from the present level of uninsurance nationally.

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Policies to reduce the number of uninsured people are rarely judged by whether they will increase insurance coverage rates among the chronically ill, despite evidence suggesting that the health benefits of coverage are greatest for these individuals. This paper examines the effect of public coverage expansions on insurance take-up and unmet need by low-income mothers in poor health. We find a 14.3-percentage-point reduction in unmet need among mothers reporting fair or poor health status. Our results suggest that some of this reduction is due to individuals moving from inadequate private coverage to public coverage.

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