Will work for insurance

[Research Highlight]

June 08, 2017

Would expanding Medicaid make people less willing to hold a job?

The long-term impact of infant care

[Research Highlight]

September 20, 2017

How a home visiting program for babies in Denmark helped improve their health in middle age.

How much is clean air worth?

[Research Highlight]

October 10, 2017

The benefits of a cap-and-trade program are larger than once thought.

Breaking taboos and making policy

[Research Highlight]

October 18, 2017

The Netherlands' legal prostitution zones reduced citywide crime.

The power of Papal persuasion

[Research Highlight]

November 02, 2017

How much did Pope John Paul II influence the beliefs and actions of Catholics?

Policy Watch: The Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan

By Roger Feldman, Kenneth E. Thorpe, and Bradley Gray

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2002

This short feature describes the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan (FEHBP), which provides health insurance benefits to active and retired federal employees and their dependents. The article discusses the FEHBP as a touchstone for research on employm...

Early Life Health and Cognitive Function in Old Age

By Anne Case and Christina Paxson

American Economic Review, May 2009

The Effect of Classmate Characteristics on Post-secondary Outcomes: Evidence from the Add Health

By Robert Bifulco, Jason M. Fletcher, and Stephen L. Ross

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2011

This paper uses a within-school/across-cohort design to present new evidence of the effects of high school classmate characteristics on a wide range of post-secondary outcomes. We find that increases in the percent of classmates with college-educated moth...

Physician Payment Reform and Hospital Referrals

By Kate Ho and Ariel Pakes

American Economic Review, May 2014

Commercial health insurers in California use provider capitation payments to different extents. These are similar to arrangements introduced by the recent health reforms to give physicians incentives to control costs. In a previous paper we showed that pa...

Pharmaceuticals and the Developing World

[Symposium: Pharmaceuticals]

By Michael Kremer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2002

Pharmaceuticals have greatly improved health in developing countries, but many people in developing countries do not obtain even inexpensive pharmaceuticals and little pharmaceutical R&D is oriented toward products needed by developing countries, such as ...

Selection in Insurance Markets: Theory and Empirics in Pictures

By Liran Einav and Amy Finkelstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2011

Government intervention in insurance markets is ubiquitous and the theoretical basis for such intervention, based on classic work from the 1970s, has been the problem of adverse selection. Over the last decade, empirical work on selection in insurance mar...

The War on Drugs: Methamphetamine, Public Health, and Crime

By Carlos Dobkin and Nancy Nicosia

American Economic Review, March 2009

In mid-1995, a government effort to reduce the supply of methamphetamine precursors successfully disrupted the methamphetamine market and interrupted a trajectory of increasing usage. The price of methamphetamine tripled and purity declined from 90 per...

The Value of Postsecondary Credentials in the Labor Market: An Experimental Study

By David J. Deming, Noam Yuchtman, Amira Abulafi, Claudia Goldin, and Lawrence F. Katz

American Economic Review, March 2016

We study employers' perceptions of the value of postsecondary degrees using a field experiment. We randomly assign the sector and selectivity of institutions to fictitious resumes and apply to real vacancy postings for business and health jobs on a lar...

The Effect of Female Education on Fertility and Infant Health: Evidence from School Entry Policies Using Exact Date of Birth

By Justin McCrary and Heather Royer

American Economic Review, February 2011

This paper uses age-at-school-entry policies to identify the effect of female education on fertility and infant health. We focus on sharp contrasts in schooling, fertility, and infant health between women born just before and after the school entry date. ...

How Do Providers Respond to Changes in Public Health Insurance Coverage? Evidence from Adult Medicaid Dental Benefits

By Thomas Buchmueller, Sarah Miller, and Marko Vujicic

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2016

This study evaluates how large changes in public health insurance coverage affect provider behavior and patient wait times by analyzing a common type of primary care: dental services. When states expand coverage of dental services to adult Medicaid benefi...

Under the Weather: Health, Schooling, and Economic Consequences of Early-Life Rainfall

By Sharon Maccini and Dean Yang

American Economic Review, June 2009

We examine the effect of early-life rainfall on the health, education, and socioeconomic outcomes of Indonesian adults. We link historical rainfall for each individual's birth year and birth location with adult outcomes from the 2000 Indonesia Family Life...

Impatience and Uncertainty: Experimental Decisions Predict Adolescents' Field Behavior

By Matthias Sutter, Martin G. Kocher, Daniela Glätzle-Rützler, and Stefan T. Trautmann

American Economic Review, February 2013

We study risk attitudes, ambiguity attitudes, and time preferences of 661 children and adolescents, aged ten to eighteen years, in an incentivized experiment and relate experimental choices to field behavior. Experimental measures of impatience are found ...

Why Are Saving Rates of Urban Households in China Rising?

By Marcos D. Chamon and Eswar S. Prasad

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2010

From 1995 to 2005, the average urban household savings rate in China rose by 7 percentage points, to about one-quarter of disposable income. Savings rates increased across all demographic groups, and the age profile of savings has an unusual pattern in r...

Are We Finally Winning the War on Cancer?

[Symposium: Health Care]

By David M. Cutler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2008

President Nixon declared what came to be known as the "war on cancer" in 1971 in his State of the Union address. At first the war on cancer went poorly: despite a substantial increase in resources, age-adjusted cancer mortality increased by 8 percent betw...

The Questionable Value of Having a Choice of Levels of Health Insurance Coverage

[Symposium: Health Insurance and Choice]

By Keith Marzilli Ericson and Justin Sydnor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2017

In most health insurance markets in the United States, consumers have substantial choice about their health insurance plan. However additional choice is not an unmixed blessing as it creates challenges related to both consumer confusion and adverse sele...