The Digest

While investor attention often focuses on carbon emissions, local pollutants are also important components of many firms’ environmental damages. Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) concerns have become increasingly important drivers of investor behavior, and a range of indices seek to guide this investment by tracking firms’ performance on each dimension of sustainability. Measures of firms’ carbon emissions are often cited in this context. In Measuring...

In the NBA 3-Point Contest, a player who successfully makes a shot is more likely to make his next one when it is from the same location, but not otherwise. When professional basketball players have a particularly successful game, hitting shot after shot, commentators often remark that they have a “hot hand.” The persistence of success, in basketball and other sports, has also attracted increasingly systematic study. In The Hot Hand in the NBA 3-Point Contest: The...

An Affordable Care Act related increase in reimbursements for providers serving low-income Medicare beneficiaries increased this group’s access to medical care. Low-income elderly and disabled individuals are eligible for health insurance through both Medicare, which is federally funded and administered, and Medicaid, which receives some federal funding but is administered by the states. These “dual-eligible” beneficiaries account for less than one-fifth of the...