Is American Health Care Uniquely Inefficient? Evidence from Prescription Drugs

By Margaret Kyle and Heidi Williams

American Economic Review, May 2017

Alan Garber and Jonathan Skinner (2008) famously conjectured that the US health care system was "uniquely inefficient" relative to other countries. We test this idea using cross-country data on prescription drug sales newly linked with an arguably objecti...

The Impact of Nearly Universal Insurance Coverage on Health Care Utilization: Evidence from Medicare

By David Card, Carlos Dobkin, and Nicole Maestas

American Economic Review, December 2008

The onset of Medicare eligibility at age 65 leads to sharp changes in the health insurance coverage of the US population. These changes lead to increases in the use of medical services, with a pattern of gains across socioeconomic groups that varies by ty...

Policy Watch: Alcohol and Cigarette Taxes

By Michael Grossman, Jody L. Sindelar, John Mullahy, and Richard Anderson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1993

Increased excise taxes on cigarettes and alcohol have been suggested as a means to finance (at least partially) the Clinton administration's proposed program of health care reform. We consider the revenue potential of cigarette and alcohol tax hikes and e...

Possible Reforms for Financing Long-Term Care

[Symposium: Health Economics]

By William J. Scanlon

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1992

This paper considers the market for long-term care services to treat and compensate for chronic health conditions and disabilities. This paper describes how the long-term care market has evolved and the resulting implications for expenditure control. It r...

The Minimum Legal Drinking Age and Public Health

By Christopher Carpenter and Carlos Dobkin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2011

The Amethyst Initiative, signed by more than 100 college presidents and other higher education officials calls for a reexamination of the minimum legal drinking age in the United States. A central argument of the initiative is that the U.S. minimum legal ...

Are You Sure You're Saving Enough for Retirement?

[Symposium: The Adequacy of Retirement Saving]

By Jonathan Skinner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2007

Many view the soon-to-retire Baby Boomers as woefully unprepared for their golden years, while other economists have taken a more sanguine view of American levels of saving. And if Americans are failures at saving enough for retirement, why are some retir...

Making the Transition to Prepaid Medicare

[Symposium: The Future of Medicare]

By Thomas R. Saving

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2000

The Medicare system is facing a financial crisis brought on by the combination of rapidly rising consumption of health care services by beneficiaries and financing based on generation transfers. This paper simulates a transition to prepaid Medicare where ...

Inheritances, Intergenerational Transfers, and the Accumulation of Health

By Katherine Grace Carman

American Economic Review, May 2013

This paper considers the mechanisms behind a positive correlation between inheritances and health. First, there may merely be a correlation: those from families with enough wealth to provide an inheritance tend to have better health. Second, financial res...

Technology Growth and Expenditure Growth in Health Care

By Amitabh Chandra and Jonathan Skinner

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2012

In the United States, health care technology has contributed to rising survival rates, yet health care spending relative to GDP has also grown more rapidly than in any other country. We develop a model of patient demand and supplier behavior to explain th...

Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise: Socioeconomic Status, Poor Health in Childhood, and Human Capital Development

By Janet Currie

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2009

There are many possible pathways between parental education, income, and health, and between child health and education, but only some of them have been explored in the literature. This essay focuses on links between parental socioeconomic status (as m...

The Accelerated Benefits Demonstration: Impacts on the Employment of Disability Insurance Beneficiaries

By Michelle Stegman Bailey and Robert R. Weathers II

American Economic Review, May 2014

We use data from the Accelerated Benefits demonstration to estimate the impacts of providing newly entitled disability insurance (DI) beneficiaries with health insurance and additional services during the DI program's 24-month Medicare waiting period. Whi...

Long-Run Impacts of Childhood Access to the Safety Net

By Hilary Hoynes, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, and Douglas Almond

American Economic Review, April 2016

We examine the impact of a positive and policy-driven change in economic resources available in utero and during childhood. We focus on the introduction of the Food Stamp Program, which was rolled out across counties between 1961 and 1975. We use the P...

Transactional Sex as a Response to Risk in Western Kenya

By Jonathan Robinson and Ethan Yeh

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2011

Though formal and informal sex work has long been identified as crucial for the spread of HIV/AIDS, the nature of the sex-for-money market remains poorly understood. Using a unique panel dataset constructed from 192 self-reported diaries, we find that wom...

Adverse Selection and an Individual Mandate: When Theory Meets Practice

By Martin B. Hackmann, Jonathan T. Kolstad, and Amanda E. Kowalski

American Economic Review, March 2015

We develop a model of selection that incorporates a key element of recent health reforms: an individual mandate. Using data from Massachusetts, we estimate the parameters of the model. In the individual market for health insurance, we find that premiums a...

From State to Market: A Survey of Empirical Studies on Privatization

By William L. Megginson and Jeffry M. Netter

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2001

This study surveys the literature examining the privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) We review the history of privatization, the theoretical and empirical evidence on the relative performance of state owned and privately owned firms, the types ...

The RAND Health Insurance Experiment, Three Decades Later

By Aviva Aron-Dine, Liran Einav, and Amy Finkelstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2013

Between 1974 and 1981, the RAND health insurance experiment provided health insurance to more than 5,800 individuals from about 2,000 households in six different locations across the United States, a sample designed to be representative of families with ...

Parental Education and Child Health: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Taiwan

By Shin-Yi Chou, Jin-Tan Liu, Michael Grossman, and Ted Joyce

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2010

In 1968, the Taiwanese government extended compulsory education from 6 to 9 years and opened over 150 new junior high schools at a differential rate among regions. Within each region, we exploit variations across cohorts in new junior high school openi...

Valuing the Environment through Contingent Valuation

[Symposium: Contingent Valuation]

By W. Michael Hanemann

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1994

Contingent valuation is now used around the world to value many types of public goods, including transportation, sanitation, health, and education, as well as the environment. The author describes how researchers go about making such surveys reliable, men...

The Impact of Women's Health Clinic Closures on Preventive Care

By Yao Lu and David J. G. Slusky

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2016

We examine the impact of women's health clinic closures on women's preventive care use in Texas and Wisconsin using a unique policy context, data on clinic street addresses, and confidential respondent ZIP codes from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillanc...

New Evidence on the Aftermath of Financial Crises in Advanced Countries

By Christina D. Romer and David H. Romer

American Economic Review, October 2017

This paper examines the aftermath of postwar financial crises in advanced countries. We construct a new semiannual series on financial distress in 24 OECD countries for the period 1967-2012. The series is based on assessments of the health of countries' f...