Medicare Reform: The Larger Picture

[Symposium: The Future of Medicare]

By Victor R. Fuchs

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2000

The "Medicare problem" is examined as part of the larger problem of providing for the overall financial needs of the elderly. Several myths about Medicare are discussed, and sources and uses of the elderly's "full income" are estimated. The paper explores...

Child Benefits, Maternal Employment, and Children's Health: Evidence from Canadian Child Benefit Expansions

By Kevin Milligan and Mark Stabile

American Economic Review, May 2009

The Impact of Medical Liability Standards on Regional Variations in Physician Behavior: Evidence from the Adoption of National-Standard Rules

By Michael Frakes

American Economic Review, February 2013

I explore the association between regional variations in physician behavior and the geographical scope of malpractice standards of care. I estimate a 30-50 percent reduction in the gap between state and national utilization rates of various treatments ...

What Explains Changes in Retirement Plans during the Great Recession?

By Gopi Shah Goda, John B. Shoven, and Sita Nataraj Slavov

American Economic Review, May 2011

We examine changes in subjective probabilities regarding retirement between the 2006 and 2008 waves of the Health and Retirement Study. Using a first-difference approach to eliminate individual heterogeneity, we find that the steep drop in asset prices in...

Medicare Reform: Fundamental Problems, Incremental Steps

[Symposium: The Future of Medicare]

By Mark McClellan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2000

This paper presents an overview of the Medicare reform debate. I begin by reviewing some of the features of Medicare and then turn to a discussion of reforms, both on the benefits side and on the financing side of the program. The reform proposals raise d...

Iron Deficiency and Schooling Attainment in Peru

By Alberto Chong, Isabelle Cohen, Erica Field, Eduardo Nakasone, and Maximo Torero

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2016

Do nutritional deficiencies contribute to the intergenerational persistence of poverty by reducing the earnings potential of future generations? To address this question, we made available supplemental iron pills at a health center in rural Peru and encou...

Commitment Mechanisms and Compliance with Health-Protecting Behavior: Preliminary Evidence from Orissa, India

By Alessandro Tarozzi, Aprajit Mahajan, Joanne Yoong, and Brian Blackburn

American Economic Review, May 2009

Sexual Violence against Women and Labor Market Outcomes

By Joseph J. Sabia, Angela K. Dills, and Jeffrey DeSimone

American Economic Review, May 2013

This study is the first in the economics literature to explore the labor market consequences of sexual violence toward women. Using data from the Add Health, we find that sexual violence against women is associated with a 6.6 percent lower probability of ...

The Impact of Market Size and Composition on Health Insurance Premiums: Evidence from the First Year of the Affordable Care Act

By Michael J. Dickstein, Mark Duggan, Joe Orsini, and Pietro Tebaldi

American Economic Review, May 2015

Under the Affordable Care Act, individual states have discretion in how they define coverage regions, within which insurers must charge the same premium to buyers of the same age, family structure, and smoking status. We exploit variation in these definit...

The War at Home: Effects of Vietnam-Era Military Service on Postwar Household Stability

By Dalton Conley and Jennifer Heerwig

American Economic Review, May 2011

Prior researchers have deployed the Vietnam-era draft lottery as an instrument to estimate causal effects of military service on health and earnings. However, household and residential outcomes may be more sensitive to the psychological effects of militar...

Medical Care Costs: How Much Welfare Loss?

[Symposium: Health Economics]

By Joseph P. Newhouse

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1992

Hardly a week goes by without a front-page newspaper article on rising health care costs and the uninsured. In this article, I focus mainly on costs, arguing that the issue has been somewhat misconceived: while the level of medical care spending in the U....

The Doctor Might See You Now: The Supply Side Effects of Public Health Insurance Expansions

By Craig L. Garthwaite

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2012

In the United States, public health insurance programs cover over 90 million individuals. Expansions of these programs, such as the recently passed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), may have large effects on physician behavior. This stud...

A New Era of Pollution Progress in Urban China?

[Symposium: China]

By Siqi Zheng and Matthew E. Kahn

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2017

Over the last 30 years, China's economy has boomed. This trend has lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty but it has also sharply increased local, regional, and global pollution levels. We look at the rise in air pollution over recent dec...

Issues Every Plan to Reform Health Care Financing Must Confront

[Symposium: Health Care Reform]

By Henry J. Aaron

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1994

This paper focuses on three main issues of fundamental health care reform. First, should experience rating--the linkage of premiums to actual loss experience--be retained? Despite widespread support for experience rating among economists, the paper argues...

Productivity Dispersion in Medicine and Manufacturing

By Amitabh Chandra, Amy Finkelstein, Adam Sacarny, and Chad Syverson

American Economic Review, May 2016

The conventional wisdom in health economics is that large differences in average productivity across US hospitals are the result of idiosyncratic features of the healthcare sector which dull the role of market forces. Strikingly, however, we find that pro...

Sources of Inefficiency in Healthcare and Education

By Amitabh Chandra and Douglas Staiger

American Economic Review, May 2016

Healthcare and education exhibit wide variation in spending that is loosely associated with outcomes. We study supply-side explanations for such variation in in healthcare, and extend this discussion to how it might apply to education. In both sectors, va...

Health Insurance Mandates, Mammography, and Breast Cancer Diagnoses

By Marianne P. Bitler and Christopher S. Carpenter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2016

We examine the effects of state health insurance mandates requiring coverage of screening mammograms. We find evidence that mammography mandates significantly increased mammography screenings by 4.5-25 percent. Effects are larger for women with less than ...

The Effect of Health Insurance Coverage on the Use of Medical Services

By Michael Anderson, Carlos Dobkin, and Tal Gross

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2012

Substantial uncertainty exists regarding the causal effect of health insurance on the utilization of care. We exploit a sharp change in insurance coverage rates that results from young adults "aging out" of their parents' insurance plans to estimate the ...

Time Preference, Noncognitive Skills and Well Being across the Life Course: Do Noncognitive Skills Encourage Healthy Behavior?

By Ngina Chiteji

American Economic Review, May 2010

The Worldwide Standard of Living since 1800

[Symposium: Looking Backward at Economics and the Economy]

By Richard A. Easterlin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2000

By many measures a revolution in living conditions is sweeping the world. Most people today are better fed, clothed, and house than their predecessors two centuries ago. They are healthier, live longer, and are better educated. Women's lives are less cent...