LGBTQ economics

[Research Highlight]

June 17, 2021

Lee Badgett discusses her research on the effects of sexual orientation-based discrimination and how economists can engage in the fight for equality.

Family Labor Supply Responses to Severe Health Shocks: Evidence from Danish Administrative Records

By Itzik Fadlon and Torben Heien Nielsen

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2021

We provide new evidence on households' labor supply responses to fatal and severe nonfatal health shocks in the short run and medium run. To identify causal effects, we leverage administrative data on Danish families and construct counterfactuals using ho...

Persistent protesting

[Research Highlight]

June 25, 2021

How do political movements sustain participation over the long run?

Preferred Pharmacy Networks and Drug Costs

By Amanda Starc and Ashley Swanson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2021

Selective contracting is an increasingly popular tool for reducing health care costs, but any savings must be weighed against consumer surplus losses from restricted access. Recently, many prescription drug plans (PDPs) utilize preferred pharmacy networks...

Women's Suffrage and Children's Education

By Esra Kose, Elira Kuka, and Na'ama Shenhav

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2021

While a growing literature shows that women, relative to men, prefer greater investment in children, it is unclear whether empowering women produces better economic outcomes. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in US suffrage laws, we show that expos...

The Effect of SNAP on the Composition of Purchased Foods: Evidence and Implications

By Justine Hastings, Ryan Kessler, and Jesse M. Shapiro

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2021

We use detailed data from a large retail panel to study the effect of participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) on the composition and nutrient content of foods purchased for at-home consumption. We find that the effect of SNAP...

The Long-Run Effects of Childhood Insurance Coverage: Medicaid Implementation, Adult Health, and Labor Market Outcomes

By Andrew Goodman-Bacon

American Economic Review, August 2021

This paper estimates the long-run effects of childhood Medicaid eligibility on adult health and economic outcomes using the program's original introduction (1966–1970) and its mandated coverage of welfare recipients. The design compares cohorts born in ...

Place-Based Drivers of Mortality: Evidence from Migration

By Amy Finkelstein, Matthew Gentzkow, and Heidi Williams

American Economic Review, August 2021

We estimate the effect of current location on elderly mortality by analyzing outcomes of movers in the Medicare population. We control for movers' origin locations as well as a rich vector of pre-move health measures. We also develop a novel strategy to a...

The Impacts of a Multifaceted Prenatal Intervention on Human Capital Accumulation in Early Life

By Pedro Carneiro, Lucy Kraftman, Giacomo Mason, Lucie Moore, Imran Rasul, and Molly Scott

American Economic Review, August 2021

We evaluate an intervention targeting early life nutrition and well-being for households in extreme poverty in Northern Nigeria. The intervention leads to large and sustained improvements in children's anthropometric and health outcomes, including an 8 pe...

The Great Unequalizer: Initial Health Effects of COVID-19 in the United States

[Symposium: COVID-19]

By Marcella Alsan, Amitabh Chandra, and Kosali Simon

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2021

We measure inequities from the COVID-19 pandemic on mortality and hospitalizations in the United States during the early months of the outbreak. We discuss challenges in measuring health outcomes and health inequality, some of which are specific to COVID-...

Health Inequality and COVID-19

[Page]

How have the effects of COVID-19 varied among different population groups in the United States?

Inattention and Switching Costs as Sources of Inertia in Medicare Part D

By Florian Heiss, Daniel McFadden, Joachim Winter, Amelie Wuppermann, and Bo Zhou

American Economic Review, September 2021

Consumers' health plan choices are highly persistent even though optimal plans change over time. This paper separates two sources of inertia, inattention to plan choice and switching costs. We develop a panel data model with separate attention and choice ...

Consolidation and productivity

[Research Highlight]

September 16, 2021

Should the United States be worried about its growing monopolies?

The long-run benefits of Medicaid

[Page]

Health insurance for minority children leads to better health and higher levels of employment.

Air Pollution and Criminal Activity: Microgeographic Evidence from Chicago

By Evan Herrnstadt, Anthony Heyes, Erich Muehlegger, and Soodeh Saberian

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2021

A growing literature documents that air pollution adversely impacts health, productivity, and cognition. This paper provides the first evidence of a causal link between air pollution and aggressive behavior, as documented by violent crime. Using the geolo...

Different Strokes for Different Folks? Experimental Evidence on the Effectiveness of Input and Output Incentive Contracts for Health Care Providers with Varying Skills

By Manoj Mohanan, Katherine Donato, Grant Miller, Yulya Truskinovsky, and Marcos Vera-Hernández

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2021

A central issue in designing incentive contracts is the decision to reward agents' input use versus outputs. The trade-off between risk and return to innovation in production can also lead agents with varying skill levels to perform differentially under d...

Jobs for Sale: Corruption and Misallocation in Hiring

By Jeffrey Weaver

American Economic Review, October 2021

Corrupt government hiring is common in developing countries. This paper uses original data to document the operation and consequences of corrupt hiring in a health bureaucracy. Hires pay bribes averaging 17 months of salary, but contrary to conventional w...

Barriers to expanding coverage

[Research Highlight]

October 06, 2021

How can developing countries mitigate the challenges to universal health insurance?

The Challenges of Universal Health Insurance in Developing Countries: Experimental Evidence from Indonesia's National Health Insurance

By Abhijit Banerjee, Amy Finkelstein, Rema Hanna, Benjamin A. Olken, Arianna Ornaghi, and Sudarno Sumarto

American Economic Review, September 2021

To investigate barriers to universal health insurance in developing countries, we designed a randomized experiment involving about 6,000 households in Indonesia who are subject to a government health insurance program with a weakly enforced mandate. Time-...

Rising Geographic Disparities in US Mortality

[Symposium: Geographic Disparities in Health]

By Benjamin K. Couillard, Christopher L. Foote, Kavish Gandhi, Ellen Meara, and Jonathan Skinner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

The twenty-first century has been a period of rising inequality in both income and health. In this paper, we find that geographic inequality in mortality for midlife Americans increased by about 70 percent between 1992 and 2016. This was not simply beca...