In a unique government program in Romania in 2008, certain low-income families received vouchers to subsidize the purchase a home computer for their children. Ofer Malamud and Cristian Pop-Eleches collected survey data from households who received the vouchers, and they find that home computer use has both positive and negative effects. The children whose families received a voucher reportedsignificantly lower grades in math, English, and Romanian than students without computers, but significantly higher scores in a test of computer skills and in self-reported measures of computer fluency. The presence of parental rules regarding computer use and homework appear to mitigate the negative effects of computer ownership.

Private hospitals that were built using subsidies provided by the federal Hill-Burton Act of 1946 were required to provide charity care for the first twenty years of their operation. Using data on delivery care and the health of newborns for all births in Florida during 1989-2003, combined with hospital data from the American Hospital Association, researchers Douglas Almond, Janet Currie, and Emilia Simeonova examine the impact of charity care requirements on hospitals' provision of maternity care. They find that even though these requirements were binding, private hospitals were able to service less risky maternity patients than public hospitals. Private hospitals provided less intensive maternity services, but without compromising patient health. When their mandated obligations expired, the private hospitals quickly reduced their charity caseloads, shifting maternity patients to public hospitals where they received more intensive services but did not experience improvements in health. These results suggest that public hospitals provided services less efficiently than private hospitals constrained to provide charity care.

Sara Markowitz, Erik Nesson, and Joshua Robinson study whether increases in labor market activities -- perhaps because people who work have daily contact with co-workers -- are associated with an increased incidence of the flu. They find that an increase in the employment rate does increase the number of influenza-related doctor visits. On average, 33 additional people out of every 100,000 new employees will have a flu-related doctor visit.