Mental Health Costs of Lockdowns: Evidence from Age-Specific Curfews in Turkey

By Onur Altindag, Bilge Erten, and Pinar Keskin

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2022

Using a strict, age-specific lockdown order for adults aged 65 and older in Turkey, we examine the mental health consequences of an extended period of tight mobility restrictions on senior adults. Adopting a regression discontinuity design, we find that t...

Just what the doctor ordered?

[Research Highlight]

June 22, 2022

Bradley Shapiro discusses the costs and benefits of directly advertising prescription drugs to consumers.

Breastfeeding and Child Development

By Emla Fitzsimons and Marcos Vera-Hernández

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

We show that children who are born at or just before the weekend are less likely to be breastfed, owing to poorer breastfeeding support services in hospitals at weekends. We use this variation to estimate the effect of breastfeeding on children's developm...

The Impact of Health on Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from a Large-Scale Health Experiment

By Melvin Stephens Jr. and Desmond Toohey

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

While economists have posited that health investments increase earnings, isolating the causal effect of health is challenging due to reverse causality and unobserved heterogeneity. We examine the labor market effects of a randomized controlled trial, the ...

Do Doctors Improve the Health Care of Their Parents? Evidence from Admission Lotteries

By Elisabeth Artmann, Hessel Oosterbeek, and Bas van der Klaauw

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

To assess the importance of unequal access to medical expertise and services, we estimate the causal effects of having a child who is a doctor on parents' mortality and health care use. We use data from parents of almost 22,000 participants in admission l...

The Roots of Health Inequality and the Value of Intrafamily Expertise

By Yiqun Chen, Petra Persson, and Maria Polyakova

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

In the context of Sweden, we show that having a doctor in the family raises preventive health investments throughout the life cycle, improves physical health, and prolongs life. Two quasi-experimental research designs—medical school admission lotteries ...

Out of the Woodwork: Enrollment Spillovers in the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment

By Adam Sacarny, Katherine Baicker, and Amy Finkelstein

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

We study the impact of expanded adult Medicaid eligibility on the enrollment of already-eligible children. We analyze the 2008 Oregon Medicaid lottery, in which some low-income uninsured adults were randomly selected to be allowed to apply for Medicaid. C...

The Long-Run Effects of Sports Club Vouchers for Primary School Children

By Jan Marcus, Thomas Siedler, and Nicolas R. Ziebarth

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

Childhood obesity is one of the most serious public health challenges of the twenty-first century. While small-scale experiments change behaviors among adults in the short run, we know little about the effectiveness of large-scale policies or the longer...

North-South Displacement Effects of Environmental Regulation: The Case of Battery Recycling

By Shinsuke Tanaka, Kensuke Teshima, and Eric Verhoogen

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2022

This study examines the effect of a tightening of the US air quality standard for lead in 2009 on the relocation of battery recycling to Mexico and on infant health in Mexico. In the United States, air-borne lead dropped sharply near affected plants, most...

The Impact of Financial Assistance Programs on Health Care Utilization: Evidence from Kaiser Permanente

By Alyce Adams, Raymond Kluender, Neale Mahoney, Jinglin Wang, Francis Wong, and Wesley Yin

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2022

Most hospitals have financial assistance programs for low-income patients. We use administrative data from Kaiser Permanente to study the effects of financial assistance on health care utilization. Using a regression discontinuity design based on an incom...

The Economics of Tobacco Regulation: A Comprehensive Review

By Philip DeCicca, Donald Kenkel, and Michael F. Lovenheim

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2022

Tobacco regulation has been a major component of health policy in the developed world since the UK Royal College of Physicians' and the US Surgeon General's reports in the 1960s. Such regulation, which has intensified in the past two decades, includes c...

The COVID-19 Pandemic Disrupted Both School Bullying and Cyberbullying

By Andrew Bacher-Hicks, Joshua Goodman, Jennifer Greif Green, and Melissa K. Holt

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2022

One-fifth of US high school students report being bullied each year. We use internet search data for real-time tracking of bullying patterns as COVID-19 disrupted in-person schooling. We first show that pre-pandemic internet searches contain useful inform...

Money and Politics: The Effects of Campaign Spending Limits on Political Entry and Competition

By Eric Avis, Claudio Ferraz, Frederico Finan, and Carlos Varjão

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2022

This paper studies the effects of campaign spending limits on the political entry, selection, and behavior of local politicians in Brazil. We analyze a reform that limits campaign spending for mayoral elections. The limits were implemented with a disconti...

The Health Effects of Prison

By Randi Hjalmarsson and Matthew J. Lindquist

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2022

This paper studies the health effects of Swedish prison reforms that held sentences constant but increased the share of time inmates had to serve. The increased time served did not harm post-release health and actually reduced mortality risk. We find espe...

Pathways into Opioid Dependence: Evidence from Practice Variation in Emergency Departments

By Sarah Eichmeyer and Jonathan Zhang

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2022

We use practice variation across physicians to uncover the role of medical care in causing opioid dependence. Using health records of 2 million US veterans with emergency department visits, we find that quasi-random assignment to a top (versus bottom) dec...

Is Zero a Special Price? Evidence from Child Health Care

By Toshiaki Iizuka and Hitoshi Shigeoka

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2022

Do consumers react differently to zero prices? We test the presence of a zero-price effect in child health care and find that a zero price is special as it boosts demand discontinuously. A zero price affects resource allocations by encouraging healthier c...

What Should a Firm Know? Protecting Consumers' Privacy Rents

By Daniel Bird and Zvika Neeman

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

A monopolistic firm observes a signal about the state of the world and then makes a take-it-or-leave-it offer to an uninformed consumer who has recourse to some outside option. We provide a geometric characterization of the firm's information structure th...

Health Care Rationing in Public Insurance Programs: Evidence from Medicaid

By Timothy J. Layton, Nicole Maestas, Daniel Prinz, and Boris Vabson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2022

We study two mechanisms used by public health insurance programs for rationing health care: outsourcing to private managed care plans and quantity limits for prescription drugs. Leveraging a natural experiment in Texas's Medicaid program, we find that the...

Optimal Regulation of E-cigarettes: Theory and Evidence

By Hunt Allcott and Charlie Rafkin

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2022

We model optimal e-cigarette regulation and estimate key parameters. Using tax changes and scanner data, we estimate relatively elastic demand. A demographic shift-share identification strategy suggests limited substitution between e-cigarettes and cigare...

School bullying, cyberbullying, and remote learning

[Research Highlight]

September 14, 2022

Andrew Bacher-Hicks and Joshua Goodman discuss the effects of the pandemic on bullying.