Subsidizing Health Insurance for Low-Income Adults: Evidence from Massachusetts

By Amy Finkelstein, Nathaniel Hendren, and Mark Shepard

American Economic Review, April 2019

How much are low-income individuals willing to pay for health insurance, and what are the implications for insurance markets? Using administrative data from Massachusetts' subsidized insurance exchange, we exploit discontinuities in the subsidy schedule...

Numbing the China shock

[Research Highlight]

March 06, 2020

Is there a link between free trade and deaths of despair?

Defensive Medicine: Evidence from Military Immunity

By Michael Frakes and Jonathan Gruber

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

We estimate the extent of defensive medicine by physicians, embracing the no-liability counterfactual made possible by the structure of liability rules in the Military Health System. Active-duty patients seeking treatment from military facilities cannot s...

Reducing Medical Spending of the Publicly Insured: The Case for a Cash-out Option

By Svetlana Pashchenko and Ponpoje Porapakkarm

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

Individuals' medical spending has both necessary and discretionary components, which are not, however, separately observable. This paper studies ways to improve upon existing public health insurance policies by using a framework where both the discretiona...

Advertising and Risk Selection in Health Insurance Markets

By Naoki Aizawa and You Suk Kim

American Economic Review, March 2018

This paper studies the impact of advertising as a channel for risk selection in Medicare Advantage. We provide evidence that insurer advertising is responsive to the gains from risk selection. Then we develop and estimate an equilibrium model of Medicare ...

Does It Matter if Your Health Insurer Is For Profit? Effects of Ownership on Premiums, Insurance Coverage, and Medical Spending

By Leemore Dafny

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2019

There is limited empirical evidence about the impact of for-profit health insurers on various outcomes. I study the effects of conversions to for-profit status by Blue Cross and Blue Shield (BCBS) affiliates in 11 states, spanning 28 geographic markets. I...

Was the First Public Health Campaign Successful?

By D. Mark Anderson, Kerwin Kofi Charles, Claudio Las Heras Olivares, and Daniel I. Rees

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2019

The US tuberculosis (TB) movement pioneered many of the strategies of modern public health campaigns. Using newly transcribed mortality data at the municipal level for the period 1900–1917, we explore the effectiveness of public health measures champion...

Helping moms be happier

[Research Highlight]

February 27, 2020

Providing cognitive behavioral therapy to depressed new mothers yielded benefits seven years later.

The Long-Run Impacts of a Universal Child Care Program

By Michael Baker, Jonathan Gruber, and Kevin Milligan

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

Past research documents the persistence of positive impacts of early life interventions on noncognitive skills. We test the symmetry of this finding by studying the persistence of a sizeable negative shock to noncognitive outcomes arising with the introdu...

Does Getting Health Insurance Affect Women's Fertility? Evidence from the United Mine Workers' Health Insurance

By Erin Troland and Theodore F. Figinski

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Does health insurance affect fertility decisions? Fertility may increase if insurance lowers the costs of having a child. Fertility may decrease if children are more likely to survive into adulthood (quality-quantity tradeoff). We study a largely permanen...

Examining Medicaid Expansion and the Treatment of Substance Use Disorders

By Jevay Grooms and Alberto Ortega

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

As the drug epidemic continues to cripple communities and disrupt our country, identifying and understanding state and federal policies which have helped alleviate the burden of substance use disorders (SUDs) is imperative. In 2010, the passage of the Pat...

Economic Institutions and Social Progress

By Daniel C. Fehder, Michael E. Porter, and Scott Stern

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Combining data from the social progress index and measures of economic institutions and performance, our analysis focuses on how changes in economic institutions and performance are related to subsequent changes in social progress (noneconomic dimensions ...

Sickness and the city

[Research Highlight]

March 17, 2020

Long after a cholera-ridden neighborhood in London was cured, it stayed relatively poor. Why?

In Debt and Approaching Retirement: Claim Social Security or Work Longer?

By Barbara A. Butrica and Nadia S. Karamcheva

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Over the past couple of decades, older Americans have become considerably more leveraged. This paper considers whether household debt affects the timing of retirement and Social Security benefit claiming. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, w...

Provider Supply, Utilization, and Infant Health: Evidence from a Physician Distribution Policy

By Bladimir Carrillo and Jose Feres

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

We analyze a policy that substantially expanded the supply of primary care physicians in Brazil. The program increased doctor visits across all age groups and led to greater utilization of doctors for prenatal care. However, these physicians replaced nurs...

Education and Mortality: Evidence from a Social Experiment

By Costas Meghir, Mårten Palme, and Emilia Simeonova

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2018

We examine the effects on mortality and health due to a major Swedish educational reform that increased the years of compulsory schooling. Using the gradual phase-in of the reform between 1949 and 1962 across municipalities, we estimate insignificant effe...

Retirement Lock and Prescription Drug Insurance: Evidence from Medicare Part D

By Gal Wettstein

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2020

I examine whether lack of an individual market for prescription drug insurance causes individuals to delay retirement. Exploiting the 2006 introduction of Medicare Part D, which subsidized drug insurance for Americans over age 65, I use a triple-differenc...

Space, the Final Economic Frontier

By Matthew Weinzierl

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2018

After decades of centralized control of economic activity in space, NASA and US policymakers have begun to cede the direction of human activities in space to commercial companies. NASA garnered more than 0.7 percent of GDP in the mid-1960s, but is only ...

Public Spillovers from Private Insurance Contracting: Physician Responses to Managed Care

By Michael R. Richards and D. Sebastian Tello-Trillo

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2019

Managed care is rebounding as more emphasis is placed on cost containment. These efforts may benefit consumers but challenge providers; however, empirical evidence on how supply-side managed care influences physicians is incomplete. We leverage a quasi-ex...

The trade-offs of logging off

[Research Highlight]

March 03, 2020

Would quitting Facebook result in a happier and less polarized society?