Superfund Cleanups and Infant Health

By Janet Currie, Michael Greenstone, and Enrico Moretti

American Economic Review, May 2011

We are the first to examine the effect of Superfund cleanups on infant health rather than focusing on proximity to a site. We study singleton births to mothers residing within 5km of a Superfund site between 1989-2003 in five large states. Our "difference...

The Effects of the Massachusetts Health Reform on Household Financial Distress

By Bhashkar Mazumder and Sarah Miller

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2016

In this paper, we examine the effect of a major health care reform in Massachusetts on a broad set of financial outcomes using credit report data. We exploit variation in the impact of the reform across counties and age groups using pre-reform insurance c...

Identification of the Effect of Depression on Risky Sexual Behavior: Exploiting a Natural Experiment

By Susan L. Averett and Yang Wang

American Economic Review, May 2012

Depression is pervasive in the US particularly among women. The costs in terms of direct medical costs and forgone earnings are substantial. This paper investigates an additional cost of depression. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adol...

Public-Place Smoking Laws and Exposure to Environmental Tobacco Smoke (ETS)

By Christopher Carpenter, Sabina Postolek, and Casey Warman

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2011

Public-place smoking restrictions are the most important non-price tobacco control measures worldwide, yet surprisingly little is known about their effects on exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS). We study these laws in Canada using data with que...

Does Early Life Exposure to Cigarette Smoke Permanently Harm Childhood Welfare? Evidence from Cigarette Tax Hikes

By David Simon

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2016

Evidence suggests that excise taxes on tobacco improve fetal health. However, it remains unknown if smoke exposure in early life causes lasting harm to children. I find that in utero exposure to a dollar increase in the state cigarette tax causes a 10 per...

Parental Education and Offspring Outcomes: Evidence from the Swedish Compulsory School Reform

By Petter Lundborg, Anton Nilsson, and Dan-Olof Rooth

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2014

We use the Swedish compulsory school reform to estimate the causal effect of parental education on sons' outcomes. To this end, we use data from the Swedish military enlistment register on the entire population of males and consider outcomes, such as c...

Do Workplace Smoking Bans Reduce Smoking?

By William N. Evans, Matthew C. Farrelly, and Edward Montgomery

American Economic Review, September 1999

In recent years workplace smoking policies have become increasingly prevalent and restrictive. Using data from two large-scale national surveys, we investigate whether these policies reduce smoking. Our estimates suggest that workplace bans reduce smoking...

Influenza Vaccination Campaigns: Is an Ounce of Prevention Worth a Pound of Cure?

By Courtney J. Ward

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2014

This paper estimates the overall impact and externality effects of an influenza vaccination program expanding coverage outside the typical target group. Using a triple-difference design, which exploits the introduction of a broad based vaccination prog...

The Effects of Medicare on Medical Expenditure Risk and Financial Strain

By Silvia Helena Barcellos and Mireille Jacobson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2015

Medicare offers substantial protection from medical expenditure risk, protection that has increased in recent years. At age 65, out-of-pocket expenditures drop by 33 percent at the mean and 53 percent at the ninety-fifth percentile. Medical-related financ...

The War on Poverty's Experiment in Public Medicine: Community Health Centers and the Mortality of Older Americans

By Martha J. Bailey and Andrew Goodman-Bacon

American Economic Review, March 2015

This paper uses the rollout of the first Community Health Centers (CHCs) to study the longer-term health effects of increasing access to primary care. Within ten years, CHCs are associated with a reduction in age-adjusted mortality rates of 2 percent amon...

Pricing in the Market for Anticancer Drugs

By David H. Howard, Peter B. Bach, Ernst R. Berndt, and Rena M. Conti

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2015

In 2011, Bristol-Myers Squibb set the price of its newly approved melanoma drug ipilimumab— brand name Yervoy—at $120,000 for a course of therapy. The drug was associated with an incremental increase in life expectancy of four months. Drugs ...

Evaluating Welfare Reform Waivers under Section 1115

By Carol Harvey, Michael J. Camasso, and Radha Jagannathan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2000

Beginning in 1962, Section 1115 of the Social Security Act allowed the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services to waive specific provisions of the act within individual states, allowing them to implement welfare experiments or demonstration projects t...

Giving Mom a Break: The Impact of Higher EITC Payments on Maternal Health

By William N. Evans and Craig L. Garthwaite

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2014

The 1993 expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit created the first meaningful separation in benefits between families containing two or more children and those with only one child. If income is protective of health, we should see improvements over t...

Housing, Health, and Happiness

By Matias D. Cattaneo, Sebastian Galiani, Paul J. Gertler, Sebastian Martinez, and Rocio Titiunik

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2009

We investigate the impact of a large-scale Mexican program to replace dirt floors with cement floors on child health and adult happiness. We find that replacing dirt floors with cement significantly improves the health of young children measured by dec...

Tradeoffs from Integrating Diagnosis and Treatment in Markets for Health Care

By Christopher C. Afendulis and Daniel P. Kessler

American Economic Review, June 2007

To identify the important tradeoffs in consulting a single expert for both diagnosis and treatment, we examine the costs and health outcomes of elderly Medicare beneficiaries with coronary artery disease. We compare the empirical consequences of diagnosis...

Saving Lives at Birth: The Impact of Home Births on Infant Outcomes

By N. Meltem Daysal, Mircea Trandafir, and Reyn van Ewijk

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2015

Many developed countries have recently experienced sharp increases in home birth rates. This paper investigates the impact of home births on the health of low-risk newborns using data from the Netherlands, the only developed country where home births are ...

HIV Risk and Adolescent Behaviors in Africa

By Anne Case and Christina Paxson

American Economic Review, May 2013

We investigate the relationship between HIV, marriage and nonmarital sexual activity, with a focus on adolescent behaviors. We use data from 45 Demographic and Health Surveys to examine how adolescent behavior among women born from 1958 to 1965 are relate...

Beyond Happiness and Satisfaction: Toward Well-Being Indices Based on Stated Preference

By Daniel J. Benjamin, Ori Heffetz, Miles S. Kimball, and Nichole Szembrot

American Economic Review, September 2014

This paper proposes foundations and a methodology for survey-based tracking of well-being. First, we develop a theory in which utility depends on "fundamental aspects" of well-being, measurable with surveys. Second, drawing from psychologists, philosopher...

Adult Child Migration and the Health of Elderly Parents Left behind in Mexico

By Francisca M. Antman

American Economic Review, May 2010

The Education-Health Gradient

By Gabriella Conti, James Heckman, and Sergio Urzua

American Economic Review, May 2010