Testing Paternalism: Cash versus In-Kind Transfers

By Jesse M. Cunha

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2014

Welfare programs are often implemented in-kind to promote outcomes that might not be realized under cash transfers. This paper tests whether such paternalistically motivated transfers are justified compared to cash, using a randomized controlled trial ...

Biological Measures of the Standard of Living

By Richard H. Steckel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2008

When economists investigate long-term trends and socioeconomic differences in the standard of living or quality of life, they have traditionally focused on monetary measures such as gross domestic product -- which has occupied center stage for over 50 yea...

Public Policy and the Dynamics of Children's Health Insurance, 1986-1999

By John C. Ham, Xianghong Li, and Lara D. Shore-Sheppard

American Economic Review, May 2009

Autopsy on an Empire: Understanding Mortality in Russia and the Former Soviet Union

[Symposium: The Economy of Russia]

By Elizabeth Brainerd and David M. Cutler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2005

Male life expectancy at birth fell by over six years in Russia between 1989 and 1994. Many other countries of the former Soviet Union saw similar declines, and female life expectancy fell as well. Using cross-country and Russian household survey data, we ...

Addressing Absence

[Symposium: Public Sector Absenteeism]

By Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2006

Absent providers are a major problem both for public health facilities and primary schools in many developing countries. For example, in India, absence rates for teachers are over 24 percent, and for health providers they are over 40 percent. This paper p...

Adverse Selection and Inertia in Health Insurance Markets: When Nudging Hurts

By Benjamin R. Handel

American Economic Review, December 2013

This paper investigates consumer inertia in health insurance markets, where adverse selection is a potential concern. We leverage a major change to insurance provision that occurred at a large firm to identify substantial inertia, and develop and estim...

The Effect of an Employer Health Insurance Mandate on Health Insurance Coverage and the Demand for Labor: Evidence from Hawaii

By Thomas C. Buchmueller, John DiNardo, and Robert G. Valletta

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2011

We examine the effects of the most durable employer health insurance mandate in the United States, Hawaii's Prepaid Health Care Act, using Current Population Survey data covering the years 1979 to 2005. Relying on a variation of the classical Fisher permu...

Do Health Care Providers Respond to Demand-Side Incentives? Evidence from Indonesia

By Margaret Triyana

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2016

This paper exploits the subdistrict randomization of Indonesia's household Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) program to analyze how the program affects the local health care market. The CCT program is associated with increased use of midwives as the main de...

A Pragmatic Approach to Capital Account Liberalization

By Eswar S. Prasad and Raghuram G. Rajan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2008

In the mid-1990s, mainstream economists of nearly all stripes commonly recommended capital account liberalization -- that is, allowing a free flow of funds in and out of a country's economy -- as an essential step in the process of economic development. B...

Approaches to Estimating the Health State Dependence of the Utility Function

By Amy Finkelstein, Erzo F. P. Luttmer, and Matthew J. Notowidigdo

American Economic Review, May 2009

The Trade-Offs of Welfare Policies in Labor Markets with Informal Jobs: The Case of the "Seguro Popular" Program in Mexico

By Mariano Bosch and Raymundo M. Campos-Vazquez

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2014

In 2002, the Mexican government began an effort to improve health access to the 50 million uninsured in Mexico, a program known as Seguro Popular (SP). The SP offered virtually free health insurance to informal workers, altering the incentives to opera...

Wage Gains Associated with Height as a Form of Health Human Capital

By T. Paul Schultz

American Economic Review, May 2002

The Mismatch Between Life Insurance Holdings and Financial Vulnerabilities: Evidence from the Health and Retirement Study

By B. Douglas Bernheim, Lorenzo Forni, Jagadeesh Gokhale, and Laurence J. Kotlikoff

American Economic Review, March 2003

Price and Spouse's Coverage in Employee Demand for Health Insurance

By Irena Dushi and Marjorie Honig

American Economic Review, May 2003

Evaluating Alternative Approaches to Incremental Health-Insurance Expansion

By Jonathan Gruber

American Economic Review, May 2003

After a small decline, the number of uninsured persons in the United States is on the rise again, at over 41 million (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2002). This increase is likely to spur efforts to cover the uninsured through legislative action....

A New Approach to Risk-Spreading via Coverage-Expansion Subsidies

By John Holahan, Len M. Nichols, Linda J. Blumberg, and Yu-Chu Shen

American Economic Review, May 2003

The persistently large number of uninsured, roughly 40 million per year since 1993, continues to elicit bipartisan policy interest. Coverage-expansion proposals without mandates, by far the most common since the defeat of the Clinton plan, must address ri...

Reinsuring Risk to Increase Access to Health Insurance

By Katherine Swartz

American Economic Review, May 2003

At least 41 million Americans are currently without health insurance in any given month (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2002). They are uninsured for a variety of reasons, and most people who lack coverage are affected by more than one reason. Two generalizat...

Policy Watch: Medicare

By Joseph P. Newhouse

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1996

The forecast growth for Medicare spending has created a highly visible budgetary impasse between the president and Congress. Both favor the growth of health plans that accept risk and would promote them by creating less restrictive options than heretofore...

Personality Traits and Performance Contracts: Evidence from a Field Experiment among Maternity Care Providers in India

By Katherine Donato, Grant Miller, Manoj Mohanan, Yulya Truskinovsky, and Marcos Vera-Hernández

American Economic Review, May 2017

We study how agents respond to performance incentives according to key personality traits (conscientiousness and neuroticism) through a field experiment offering financial incentives for improving maternal and neonatal health outcomes to rural Indian doct...

Mothers Care More, but Fathers Decide: Educating Parents about Child Health in Uganda

By Martina Björkman Nyqvist and Seema Jayachandran

American Economic Review, May 2017

Research on intrahousehold decision-making generally finds that fathers have more bargaining power than mothers, but mothers put more weight on children's well-being. This suggests a tradeoff when targeting policies to improve child health: fathers have m...