COVID‐19 has led many governments to impose lockdowns in efforts to reduce the spread of the virus. One of the many consequences of the lockdown is a reduction in crime. We apply a difference‐in‐differences approach to the 2018–2020 Crime Statistics to investigate the effect of the 2020 lockdown on crime victimization in Japan. We find that the 2020 lockdown leads to 12.7% and 20.9% declines in violent and property crime victimization rates per 100,000 people, respectively. Moreover, we observe that premeditated crimes, such as breaking‐and‐entering and sexual assault, decline more than non‐premeditated crimes, such as homicide. We also explore the heterogeneous effects of the lockdown by age groups. We observe that there is a significant decline in sexual assault victimization for those between the ages of 0 and 29, and there are significant declines in overall violent and property crime victimizations and their subtypes for those between ages of 30 and 59. Finally, we show that there is an improvement in suicide rates, which suggests that better mental health is the mechanism partially mediating the relationship between lockdown and crime victimization.

Countries seeking to move away from a purely fee-for-service (FFS) system may consider a hybrid approach whereby only some procedures are paid by FFS while others are paid prospectively. Yet little evidence exists whether such a hybrid payment system contains overall costs without adverse influences on health outcomes. In 2003, Japan experienced a reform from FFS to a hybrid payment system in which only some inpatient procedures were paid prospectively. We exploit this reform to test how such a hybrid system affects overall costs and health outcomes. Briefly, we find that healthcare providers responded opportunistically to the reform, moving some procedures out of the bundled inpatient setting to FFS services, leading to no reduction in cost. There was some evidence of a moderate deterioration in health outcomes, in terms of a decline in the probability of symptoms being cured at discharge. In sum, our results suggest that in some cases, a hybrid payment system can be non-superior to either FFS or prospective payment system. K E Y W O R D S bundled payment, hybrid payment system, substitution behavior, price regulation 1 | INTRODUCTION Since 2000, global health spending has increased at an annual rate of 4.0%, about 1.5 times the 2.8% annual growth rate of the global economy (Xu et al., 2018). To contain costs, many countries have opted to replace traditional Fee-For-Service (FFS) payments with a prospective payment system (PPS), incentivizing providers to reduce costs by avoiding unnecessary services (Carroll, Chernew, Fendrick, Thompson, & Rose, 2018; Ho & Pakes, 2014). However, providers could also be incentivized to avoid unprofitable patients and discharge patients inappropriately early (Ellis, 1998; Gilman, 2000). Such behaviors may reduce costs at the expense of population health; for example, Cutler (1995) finds higher mortality and readmission rates at hospitals paid by PPS. Consequently, an increasing number of countries have experimented with hybridizing the two payment systems to preserve the advantages and mitigate the disadvantages of each (Ellis & McGuire, 1986; Ma, 1994; Robinson, 2001). The PPS nature of a hybrid payment system can blunt the excessive financial incentives of FFS and contain costs. The FFS nature, in turn, can mitigate the unintended incentives of PPS and prevent undertreatments. Empirical evidence is mixed regarding whether a hybrid payment system is better at containing costs than a pure FFS. A few experimental studies show that capitation-FFS hybrid systems have smaller deviations from the optimal level of treatments compared

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