Productivity Change in Health Care

By David M. Cutler and Mark McClellan

American Economic Review, May 2001

Happiness on Tap: Piped Water Adoption in Urban Morocco

By Florencia Devoto, Esther Duflo, Pascaline Dupas, William Parienté, and Vincent Pons

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2012

Connecting private dwellings to the water main is expensive and typically cannot be publicly financed. We show that households' willingness to pay for a private connection is high when it can be purchased on credit, not because a connection improves healt...

The Quantity and Quality of Life and the Evolution of World Inequality

By Gary S. Becker, Tomas J. Philipson, and Rodrigo R. Soares

American Economic Review, March 2005

GDP per capita is usually used to proxy for the quality of life of individuals living in different countries. Welfare is also affected by quantity of life, however, as represented by longevity. This paper incorporates longevity into an overall assessment ...

The Consequences of the Growth of Health Insurance Premiums

By Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra

American Economic Review, May 2005

Effects of Insurance Coverage on Use of Care and Health Outcomes for Nonpoor Young Women

By Mark V. Pauly

American Economic Review, May 2005

What Explains Differences in Smoking, Drinking, and Other Health-Related Behaviors?

By David M. Cutler and Edward Glaeser

American Economic Review, May 2005

Access to Care, Provider Choice, and the Infant Health Gradient

By Anna Aizer, Adriana Lleras-Muney, and Mark Stabile

American Economic Review, May 2005

History, Institutions, and Economic Performance: The Legacy of Colonial Land Tenure Systems in India

By Abhijit Banerjee and Lakshmi Iyer

American Economic Review, September 2005

We analyze the colonial land revenue institutions set up by the British in India, and show that differences in historical property rights institutions lead to sustained differences in economic outcomes. Areas in which proprietary rights in land were histo...

Environment, Health, and Human Capital

By Joshua Graff Zivin and Matthew Neidell

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2013

In this review, we discuss three major contributions economists have made to our understanding of the relationship between the environment and individual well-being. First, in explicitly recognizing how optimizing behavior, particularly in the form of ...

The Quality of Medical Advice in Low-Income Countries

[Symposium: Development]

By Jishnu Das, Jeffrey Hammer, and Kenneth Leonard

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2008

This paper documents the quality of medical advice in low-income countries. Our evidence on health care quality in low-income countries is drawn primarily from studies in four countries: Tanzania, India, Indonesia, and Paraguay. We provide an overview of...

Universal Health Insurance in the Clinton Plan: Coverage as a Tax-Financed Public Good

[Symposium: Health Care Reform]

By Mark V. Pauly

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1994

The financing arrangements embodied in the Clinton health reform plan involve some important differences in the way in which public goods are usually financed. The subsidies to small, low-wage firms mandated to provide benefits distort markets in both lab...

What the Stock Market Decline Means for the Financial Security and Retirement Choices of the Near-Retirement Population

[Symposium: Retirement and Work Choices]

By Alan L. Gustman, Thomas L. Steinmeier, and Nahid Tabatabai

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2010

This paper investigates the effect of the current recession on the retirement age population. Data from the Health and Retirement Study suggest that those approaching retirement age (early boomers ages 53 to 58 in 2006) have only 15.2 percent of their wea...

Distinguished Fellow: In Honor of Victor Fuchs

By Joseph P. Newhouse

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1992

Victor Fuchs is a towering figure. His contributions to economics have spanned nearly 35 years. As his career has progressed, he has increasingly come to write on subjects of broad interest in a style that is accessible to noneconomists, thereby magnifyin...

Quality Adjustment for Health Care Spending on Chronic Disease: Evidence from Diabetes Treatment, 1999-2009

By Karen N. Eggleston, Nilay D. Shah, Steven A. Smith, Ernst R. Berndt, and Joseph P. Newhouse

American Economic Review, May 2011

Although US health care expenditures reached 17.6 percent of GDP in 2009, quality measurement in this important service sector remains limited. Studying quality changes associated with 11 years of health care for patients with diabetes, we find that the v...

Killer Cities: Past and Present

By W. Walker Hanlon and Yuan Tian

American Economic Review, May 2015

The industrial cities of the 19th century were incredibly unhealthy places to live. How much progress has been made in reducing these negative health effects over the past 150 years? To help answer this question, we compare mortality patterns in 19th cent...

Delivering Public Health Insurance through Private Plan Choice in the United States

[Symposium: Health Insurance and Choice]

By Jonathan Gruber

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2017

The United States has seen a sea change in the way that publicly financed health insurance coverage is provided to low-income, elderly, and disabled enrollees. When programs such as Medicare and Medicaid were introduced in the 1960s, the government dire...

Change, Consolidation, and Competition in Health Care Markets

By Martin Gaynor and Deborah Haas-Wilson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1999

In this paper, the authors summarize the nature of the changes in the structure of the health-care industry. They focus on the markets for health insurance, hospital services, and physician services. They discuss the potential implications of the restruct...

Two Improvements on the Clinton Framework

[Symposium: Health Care Reform]

By Peter A. Diamond

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1994

Under the Clinton proposal, states choose a single payer or large regional alliances, where individuals choose from all plans in the market. This should give the high administrative costs of individual choice, not those of group choice. States should have...

Quality Improvement in Health Care: A Framework for Price and Output Measurement

By Irving Shapiro, Matthew D. Shapiro, and David W. Wilcox

American Economic Review, May 1999

Have Gender Gaps in Insurance Coverage and Access to Care Narrowed under Health Reform? Findings from Massachusetts

By Sharon K. Long, Karen Stockley, and Shanna Shulman

American Economic Review, May 2011

Under its health reform legislation, Massachusetts has achieved near universal insurance coverage, along with significant gains in health care access and affordability. This paper examines the impacts of health reform in Massachusetts on differences in co...