Financial Education and Timely Decision Support: Lessons from Junior Achievement

By Bruce Ian Carlin and David T. Robinson

American Economic Review, May 2012

Using data from a finance theme park at Junior Achievement of Southern California, we explore how timely decision support is impacted by previous exposure to financial education. Some students received a 19-hour curriculum before participating, and some d...

Messaging and the Mandate: The Impact of Consumer Experience on Health Insurance Enrollment through Exchanges

By Natalie Cox, Benjamin Handel, Jonathan Kolstad, and Neale Mahoney

American Economic Review, May 2015

The ability of web-based retailers to learn about and provide targeted consumer experiences is touted as an important distinction from traditional retailers. In principal, web-based insurance exchanges could benefit from these advantages. Using data from ...

The Effect of Absenteeism and Clinic Protocol on Health Outcomes: The Case of Mother-to-Child Transmission of HIV in Kenya

By Markus Goldstein, Joshua Graff Zivin, James Habyarimana, Cristian Pop-Eleches, and Harsha Thirumurthy

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2013

We show that pregnant women whose first clinic visit coincides with the nurse's attendance are 58 percentage points more likely to test for HIV and 46 percent more likely to deliver in a hospital. Furthermore, women with high pretest expectations of be...

Risk Protection, Service Use, and Health Outcomes under Colombia's Health Insurance Program for the Poor

By Grant Miller, Diana Pinto, and Marcos Vera-Hernández

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2013

Unexpected medical care spending imposes considerable financial risk on developing country households. Based on managed care models of health insurance in wealthy countries, Colombia's Régimen Subsidiado is a publicly financed insurance program target...

2017 in Research Highlights

[Research Highlight]

December 13, 2017

Economists tackled gender issues, education, globalization, and more.

Optimal Expectations and Limited Medical Testing: Evidence from Huntington Disease

By Emily Oster, Ira Shoulson, and E. Ray Dorsey

American Economic Review, April 2013

We use novel data to study genetic testing among individuals at risk for Huntington disease (HD), a hereditary disease with limited life expectancy. Although genetic testing is perfectly predictive and carries little economic cost, presymptomatic testi...

Physician Agency and Adoption of Generic Pharmaceuticals

By Toshiaki Iizuka

American Economic Review, October 2012

I examine physician agency in health care services in the context of the choice between brand-name and generic pharmaceuticals. I examine micro-panel data from Japan, where physicians can legally make profits by prescribing and dispensing drugs. The resul...

Management Practices, Relational Contracts, and the Decline of General Motors

[Symposium: Manufacturing]

By Susan Helper and Rebecca Henderson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2014

General Motors was once regarded as the best-managed and most successful firm in the world. However, between 1980 and 2009, GM's US market share fell from 46 to 20 percent, and in 2009 the firm went bankrupt. We argue that the conventional explanation f...

The Window Tax: A Case Study in Excess Burden

By Wallace E. Oates and Robert M. Schwab

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2015

The window tax provides a dramatic and transparent historical example of the potential distorting effects of taxation. Imposed in England in 1696, the tax—a kind of predecessor of the modern property tax—was levied on dwellings with the tax ...

Technological Change and Risk Adjustment: Benefit Design Incentives in Medicare Part D

By Colleen Carey

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2017

Subsidized health insurance markets use diagnosis-based risk adjustment to induce insurers to offer an equitable benefit to individuals of varying expected cost. I demonstrate that technological change after risk adjustment calibration--new drug entry and...

The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States

By David H. Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon H. Hanson

American Economic Review, October 2013

We analyze the effect of rising Chinese import competition between 1990 and 2007 on US local labor markets, exploiting cross- market variation in import exposure stemming from initial differences in industry specialization and instrumenting for US imp...

Birth Timing and Neonatal Health

By Cristina Borra, Libertad González, and Almudena Sevilla

American Economic Review, May 2016

We take advantage of a new natural experiment to evaluate the health effects of scheduling birth early for non-medical reasons on infant health. In 2010, the cancellation of a generous child benefit in Spain led may families to schedule birth early in ord...

Health and Schooling Investments in Africa

[Symposium: Slow Growth in Africa]

By T. Paul Schultz

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1999

Intercountry comparisons show Africa's health and education falls short of other regions, controlling for income, women's educations, and urbanization, but growth regressions do not clarify whether this low human capital caused slow growth. Microeconometr...

Why Are Recessions Good for Your Health?

By Douglas L. Miller, Marianne E. Page, Ann Huff Stevens, and Mateusz Filipski

American Economic Review, May 2009

Reforming Payments to Healthcare Providers: The Key to Slowing Healthcare Cost Growth While Improving Quality?

[Symposium: Constraining Healthcare Costs]

By Mark McClellan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2011

This paper focuses on a broad movement toward a fundamentally different way of paying healthcare providers. The approach reaches beyond the old dichotomies about whether healthcare providers are reimbursed on a fee-for-service or a "capitated" or per-pers...

Growth, Pollution, and Life Expectancy: China from 1991-2012

By Avraham Ebenstein, Maoyong Fan, Michael Greenstone, Guojun He, Peng Yin, and Maigeng Zhou

American Economic Review, May 2015

This paper examines the relationship between income, pollution, and mortality in China from 1991-2012. Using first-difference models, we document a robust positive association between city-level GDP and life expectancy. We also find a negative association...

Does State Fiscal Relief during Recessions Increase Employment? Evidence from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act

By Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, Laura Feiveson, Zachary Liscow, and William Gui Woolston

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2012

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 included $88 billion of aid to state governments administered through the Medicaid reimbursement process. We examine the effect of these transfers on states' employment. Because state fiscal relief...

How Does Risk Selection Respond to Risk Adjustment? New Evidence from the Medicare Advantage Program

By Jason Brown, Mark Duggan, Ilyana Kuziemko, and William Woolston

American Economic Review, October 2014

To combat adverse selection, governments increasingly base payments to health plans and providers on enrollees' scores from risk-adjustment formulae. In 2004, Medicare began to risk-adjust capitation payments to private Medicare Advantage (MA) plans to ...

How Did Health Care Reform in Massachusetts Impact Insurance Premiums?

By John A. Graves and Jonathan Gruber

American Economic Review, May 2012

It is widely recognized that the 2006 Massachusetts health reforms served as a blueprint for national reform under the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA). As such, there is interest in using the Massachusetts experience to understand how insurance premiums m...

Cash Transfers, Behavioral Changes, and Cognitive Development in Early Childhood: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment

By Karen Macours, Norbert Schady, and Renos Vakis

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2012

Cash transfer programs have become extremely popular in the developing world. A large literature analyzes their effects on schooling, health and nutrition, but relatively little is known about possible impacts on child development. This paper analyzes the...