Diverse provider payment systems create incentives that affect the quantity and quality of health care services provided. Payments can be based on provider characteristics, which tend to minimize incentives for quality and quantity. Or payments can be based on quantities of services provided and patient characteristics, which provide stronger incentives for quality and quantity. Payments methods using both broader bundles of services and larger numbers of payment categories are growing in prevalence. The recent innovation of performance-based payment attempts to target payments on key patient attributes so as to improve incentives, better manage patients, and control costs.

Diverse provider payment systems create incentives that affect the quantity and quality of health care services provided. Payments can be based on provider characteristics, which tend to minimize incentives for quality and quantity. Or payments can be based on quantities of services provided and patient characteristics, which provide stronger incentives for quality and quantity. Payments methods using both broader bundles of services and larger numbers of payment categories are growing in prevalence. The recent innovation of performance-based payment attempts to target payments on key patient attributes so as to improve incentives, better manage patients, and control costs.

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Households often rely on professionals with specialized knowledge to make important financial decisions. In many cases, the professional's financial interests are at odds with those of the client. We explore this problem in the context of personal bankruptcy. OLS, fixed effects, and IV estimates all show that attorneys play a central role in determining whether households file under Chapter 7 or Chapter 13 of the bankruptcy code. We present evidence suggesting that some attorneys maximize profits by steering households into Chapter 13 bankruptcy even when the households' objective financial benefits are low and the probability of case dismissal is high. An attorney-induced Chapter 13 filing increases household legal fees and reduces the probability of long-term debt relief.KEYWORDS: consumer bankruptcy, principal agent problems * We thank Tina Lindsay and Jocelyn Rick for helpful discussions regarding institutional factors affecting personal bankruptcy. We thank

This paper examines how missed income due to illness impacts household fragility. Specifically, it shows that paid sick leave laws, which provide households insurance against illness-related income shocks, reduce consumer bankruptcy. Using a panel dataset at the county-quarter level, this paper exploits the geographic and temporal variation in the adoption of paid sick leave laws to implement a difference-in-differences and event study analysis. It finds that paid sick leave laws reduce consumer bankruptcy filings by approximately 11%; this effect is seen within three quarters of the law's implementation and remains constant in magnitude and significance thereafter. As paid sick leave laws may come at a cost to businesses, this paper also examines the impact of such laws on business bankruptcy filings-it shows that paid sick leave laws have little to no impact on business bankruptcy filings.