Paying a Premium on Your Premium? Consolidation in the US Health Insurance Industry

By Leemore Dafny, Mark Duggan, and Subramaniam Ramanarayanan

American Economic Review, April 2012

We examine whether and to what extent consolidation in the US health insurance industry has contributed to higher employer-sponsored insurance premiums. We exploit the differential impact across local markets of a national merger of two insurers to identi...

Optimal Annuitization with Stochastic Mortality and Correlated Medical Costs

By Felix Reichling and Kent Smetters

American Economic Review, November 2015

The conventional wisdom since Yaari (1965) is that households without a bequest motive should fully annuitize their investments. Numerous frictions do not break this sharp result. We modify the Yaari framework by allowing a household's mortality risk itse...

The Impact of Indonesian Forest Fires on Singaporean Pollution and Health

By Tamara L. Sheldon and Chandini Sankaran

American Economic Review, May 2017

Forest burning in Indonesia results in severe episodes of "seasonal haze" in neighboring Singapore. We offer the first causal analysis of the transboundary health effects of the Indonesian forest burning. Instrumenting for air pollution with satellite fir...

Expertise versus Bias in Evaluation: Evidence from the NIH

By Danielle Li

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2017

Evaluators with expertise in a particular field may have an informational advantage in separating good projects from bad. At the same time, they may also have personal preferences that impact their objectivity. This paper examines these issues in the cont...

Human Capital and Productivity in a Team Environment: Evidence from the Healthcare Sector

By Ann P. Bartel, Nancy D. Beaulieu, Ciaran S. Phibbs, and Patricia W. Stone

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2014

Using panel data from a large hospital system, this paper presents estimates of the productivity effects of human capital in a team production environment. Proxying nurses' general human capital by education and their unit-specific human capital by expe...

Strategies for Promoting Healthier Food Choices

By Julie S. Downs, George Loewenstein, and Jessica Wisdom

American Economic Review, May 2009

Is American Health Care Uniquely Inefficient?

[Symposium: Health Care]

By Alan M. Garber and Jonathan Skinner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2008

The U.S. health system has been described as the most competitive, heterogeneous, inefficient, fragmented, and advanced system of care in the world. In this paper, we consider two questions: First, is the U.S. healthcare system productively efficient rela...

Child Health and Household Resources in South Africa: Evidence from the Old Age Pension Program

By Esther Duflo

American Economic Review, May 2000

The (Paper)Work of Medicine: Understanding International Medical Costs

[Symposium: Constraining Healthcare Costs]

By David M. Cutler and Dan P. Ly

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2011

This paper draws on international evidence on medical spending to examine what the United States can learn about making its healthcare system more efficient. We focus primarily on understanding contemporaneous differences in the level of spending, general...

Competition through Commissions and Kickbacks

By Roman Inderst and Marco Ottaviani

American Economic Review, April 2012

In markets for retail financial products and health services, consumers often rely on the advice of intermediaries to decide which specialized offering best fits their needs. Product providers, in turn, compete to influence the intermediaries' advice thr...

The Long-Term Impact of Military Service on Health: Evidence from World War II and Korean War Veterans

By Kelly Bedard and Olivier Deschênes

American Economic Review, March 2006

During the World War II and Korean War era, the U.S. military freely distributed cigarettes to overseas personnel and provided low-cost tobacco products on domestic military bases. In fact, even today the military continues to sell subsidized tobacco prod...

Zombie Lending and Depressed Restructuring in Japan

By Ricardo J. Caballero, Takeo Hoshi, and Anil K. Kashyap

American Economic Review, December 2008

Large Japanese banks often engaged in sham loan restructurings that kept credit flowing to otherwise insolvent borrowers (which we call zombies). We examine the implications of suppressing the normal competitive process whereby the zombies would shed w...

Does Machine Learning Automate Moral Hazard and Error?

By Sendhil Mullainathan and Ziad Obermeyer

American Economic Review, May 2017

Machine learning tools are beginning to be deployed en masse in health care. While the statistical underpinnings of these techniques have been questioned with regard to causality and stability, we highlight a different concern here, relating to measuremen...

Promoting Healthy Choices: Information versus Convenience

By Jessica Wisdom, Julie S. Downs, and George Loewenstein

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2010

Success in slowing obesity trends would benefit from policies aimed at reducing calorie consumption. In a field experiment at a fast-food sandwich chain, we address the effects of providing calorie information, mimicking recent legislation, and test an...

The New Life Cycle of Women's Employment: Disappearing Humps, Sagging Middles, Expanding Tops

[Symposium: Women in the Labor Market]

By Claudia Goldin and Joshua Mitchell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2017

A new life cycle of women's employment emerged with cohorts born in the 1950s. For prior cohorts, life-cycle employment had a hump shape; it increased from the twenties to the forties, hit a peak, and then declined starting in the fifties. The new life cy...

Social Security Reforms: Benefit Claiming, Labor Force Participation, and Long-Run Sustainability

By Selahattin Imrohoroğlu and Sagiri Kitao

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2012

This paper develops a general equilibrium life-cycle model with endogenous labor supply in both intensive and extensive margins, consumption, saving, and benefit claiming to measure the long-run effects of a proposed Social Security reform. Agents in the...

Health Insurance for "Humans": Information Frictions, Plan Choice, and Consumer Welfare

By Benjamin R. Handel and Jonathan T. Kolstad

American Economic Review, August 2015

Traditional models of insurance choice are predicated on fully informed and rational consumers protecting themselves from exposure to financial risk. In practice, choosing an insurance plan is a complicated decision often made without full information. In...

Health Care for the Aging Baby Boom: Lessons from Abroad

[Symposium: The Future of Medicare]

By Uwe E. Reinhardt

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2000

The economic, social, and political challenges posed by the aging of the population are real in many nations, under virtually any set of assumptions about the future. However, cross-national data on health spending on the elderly, to be presented in the f...

Limited Life Expectancy, Human Capital and Health Investments

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

American Economic Review, August 2013

Human capital theory predicts that life expectancy will impact human capital attainment. We estimate this relationship using variation in life expectancy driven by Huntington disease, an inherited neurological disorder. We compare investments for individu...

Death by Market Power: Reform, Competition, and Patient Outcomes in the National Health Service

By Martin Gaynor, Rodrigo Moreno-Serra, and Carol Propper

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2013

The effect of competition on the quality of health care remains a contested issue. Most empirical estimates rely on inference from nonexperimental data. In contrast, this paper exploits a procompetitive policy reform to provide estimates of the impact ...