The impact of the Affordable Care Act on hospital revenue

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How did the Medicaid expansion affect the finances of health care facilities in California?

Employer Incentives and Distortions in Health Insurance Design: Implications for Welfare and Costs

By Nicholas Tilipman

American Economic Review, March 2022

This paper studies employer incentives in designing health insurance provider networks and whether observed offerings reflect preferences that are aligned with employees. I estimate a model of supply and demand where I endogenize employer health plan offe...

Moving on up?

[Research Highlight]

February 18, 2022

Ellora Derenoncourt discusses how economic prospects declined for the generations of African Americans that followed the Great Migration.

Market failures vs. regulatory shortcomings

[Research Highlight]

March 02, 2022

Market-based reforms from 1999 to 2012 significantly decreased the costs of producing electricity in the United States.

Looking Back at 50 Years of the Clean Air Act

By Joseph E. Aldy, Maximilian Auffhammer, Maureen Cropper, Arthur Fraas, and Richard Morgenstern

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2022

We synthesize and review retrospective analyses of federal air quality regulations to examine the contributions of the Clean Air Act (CAA) to the vast air quality improvements seen since 1970. Geographic heterogeneity in stringency affects emissions, publ...

The increasing quality of job matching

[Research Highlight]

March 03, 2022

Better job screening is decreasing the rate of worker turnover.

Recessions, Mortality, and Migration Bias: Evidence from the Lancashire Cotton Famine

By Vellore Arthi, Brian Beach, and W. Walker Hanlon

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2022

We examine the health effects of the Lancashire Cotton Famine, a sharp downturn in Britain's cotton textile manufacturing regions that was induced by the US Civil War. Migration was an important response to this downturn, but as we document, migration als...

Health Insurance Design Meets Saving Incentives: Consumer Responses to Complex Contracts

By Adam Leive

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2022

To lower health care costs, Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) offer tax incentives encouraging people to trade off current consumption against future consumption. This paper tests whether consumers use HSAs as self-insurance over the life cycle. Using admini...

The great reset?

[Research Highlight]

March 18, 2022

Guido Alfani discusses how historical pandemics affected wealth gaps between rich and poor.

Mortality, Temperature, and Public Health Provision: Evidence from Mexico

By François Cohen and Antoine Dechezleprêtre

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2022

We examine the impact of temperature on mortality in Mexico using daily data over the period 1998–2017 and find that 3.8 percent of deaths in Mexico are caused by suboptimal temperature (26,000 every year). However, 92 percent of weather-related deaths ...

Does Hospital Crowding Matter? Evidence from Trauma and Orthopedics in England

By Thomas P. Hoe

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2022

This paper estimates the impact of hospital crowding on medical treatment decisions and patient health outcomes. Exploiting pseudorandom variation in emergency admissions, I find that a one-standard-deviation admission shock increases the unplanned readmi...

Universal Early-Life Health Policies in the Nordic Countries

[Symposium: Childhood Interventions]

By Miriam Wüst

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2022

Given mounting evidence on the negative impact of early-life shocks for the wellbeing of people over the life course, a growing economics literature studies whether early-life policies have symmetric positive effects. This paper zooms in on research on ...

Breaking through restrictive attitudes

[Research Highlight]

March 30, 2022

Can a school-based program have a meaningful impact on gender inequality?

Estimating the Effects of Milk Inspections on Infant and Child Mortality, 1880−1910

By D. Mark Anderson, Kerwin Kofi Charles, Michael McKelligott, and Daniel I. Rees

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

In the mid-nineteenth century, the urban milk supply in the United States was regularly skimmed or diluted with water, reducing its nutritional value. At the urging of public health experts, cities across the country hired milk inspectors, who were tasked...

Segregation and the Initial Provision of Water in the United States

By Brian Beach, John Parman, and Martin Saavedra

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

US cities invested heavily in water and sewer infrastructure throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These investments improved public health and quality of life by helping US cities control typhoid fever and other waterborne disease...

Measuring Changes in Disparity Gaps: An Application to Health Insurance

By Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, Karen Jiang, Zirui Song, and Jacob Wallace

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We propose a method for reporting how program evaluations reduce gaps between groups, such as the gender or Black-White gap. We first show that the reduction in disparities between groups can be written as the difference in conditional average treatment e...

Laissez-Faire, Social Networks, and Race in a Pandemic

By Roland Pongou, Guy Tchuente, and Jean-Baptiste Tondji

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We study the effects of race, network centrality, and policies that tolerate some level of virus spread (laissez-faire) on COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes in the United States. Our analysis uses unique data on nursing home networks and calibration-based ...

Parental Deportation, Safe-Zone Schools, and the Socio-Emotional and Behavioral Health of Children Left Behind

By Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes, José R. Bucheli, and Ana P. Martinez-Donate

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Over four million US-born children living in households with at least one unauthorized immigrant parent are the unintended victims of intensified immigration enforcement. In an effort to address these disadvantages, many schools and school districts throu...

The Liquidity Sensitivity of Healthcare Consumption: Evidence from Social Security Payments

By Tal Gross, Timothy J. Layton, and Daniel Prinz

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2022

Insurance is typically viewed as a mechanism for transferring resources from good to bad states. However, insurance may also transfer resources from high-liquidity periods to low-liquidity periods. We test for this type of transfer from health insurance b...

Lockdowns and depression

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Did restrictions on mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic lead to a decline in mental health?