The Relationship between Economic Status and Child Health: Evidence from the United States

By Simon Condliffe and Charles R. Link

American Economic Review, September 2008

Anne Case et al. (2002), using cross-sectional data, found a positive relationship between children's health and income, with income's protective effect increasing with age. Janet Currie and Mark Stabile (2003), using a panel of Canadian children, foun...

Income, Health, and Well-Being around the World: Evidence from the Gallup World Poll

[Symposium: Development]

By Angus Deaton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2008

During 2006, the Gallup Organization conducted a World Poll that used an identical questionnaire for national samples of adults from 132 countries. I analyze the data on life satisfaction and on health satisfaction and look at their relationships with nat...

Priceless: The Nonpecuniary Benefits of Schooling

By Philip Oreopoulos and Kjell G. Salvanes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2011

Increasing wealth provides key motivation for students to forgo earnings and struggle through exams. But, as we argue in this paper, schooling generates many experiences and affects many dimensions of skill that, in turn, affect central aspects of individ...

Selection on Moral Hazard in Health Insurance

By Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, Stephen P. Ryan, Paul Schrimpf, and Mark R. Cullen

American Economic Review, February 2013

We use employee-level panel data from a single firm to explore the possibility that individuals may select insurance coverage in part based on their anticipated behavioral ("moral hazard") response to insurance, a phenomenon we label "selection on mora...

Understanding PPPs and PPP-Based National Accounts

By Angus Deaton and Alan Heston

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2010

We provide an overview of the theory and practice of constructing PPPs. We focus on four practical areas: how to handle international differences in quality; the treatment of urban and rural areas of large countries; how to estimate prices for government ...

Supply-Side and Demand-Side Cost Sharing in Health Care

By Randall P. Ellis and Thomas G. McGuire

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1993

In health markets, the price paid by insured consumers when health care services are demanded can be set separately from the price paid to providers when services are supplied. This fact suggests two alternate strategies for controlling the costs of healt...

Health Reform, Health Insurance, and Selection: Estimating Selection into Health Insurance Using the Massachusetts Health Reform

By Martin B. Hackmann, Jonathan T. Kolstad, and Amanda E. Kowalski

American Economic Review, May 2012

We implement an empirical test for selection into health insurance using changes in coverage induced by the introduction of mandated health insurance in Massachusetts. Our test examines changes in the cost of the newly insured relative to those who were i...

The Wages of Sinistrality: Handedness, Brain Structure, and Human Capital Accumulation

By Joshua Goodman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2014

Left- and right-handed individuals have different neurological wiring, particularly with regard to language processing. Multiple datasets from the United States and the United Kingdom show that lefties exhibit significant human capital deficits relative t...

Let Them Have Choice: Gains from Shifting Away from Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance and toward an Individual Exchange

By Leemore Dafny, Kate Ho, and Mauricio Varela

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2013

Most nonelderly Americans purchase health insurance through their employers, which sponsor a limited number of plans. Using a panel dataset representing over ten million insured lives, we estimate employees' preferences for different health plans and us...

The Pragmatist's Guide to Comparative Effectiveness Research

[Symposium: Constraining Healthcare Costs]

By Amitabh Chandra, Anupam B. Jena, and Jonathan S. Skinner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2011

Following an acrimonious healthcare reform debate involving charges of "death panels," in 2010, Congress explicitly forbade the use of cost-effectiveness analysis in government programs of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In this context, ...

The Rise and Fall of Disability Insurance Enrollment in the Netherlands

[Symposium: Disability Insurance]

By Pierre Koning and Maarten Lindeboom

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2015

As recently as 15 years ago, the high level of Disability Insurance (DI) enrollment was considered to be one of the major social and economic problems of the Netherlands; indeed, the Netherlands was characterized as the country with the most out-of-contro...

Health Care Exceptionalism? Performance and Allocation in the US Health Care Sector

By Amitabh Chandra, Amy Finkelstein, Adam Sacarny, and Chad Syverson

American Economic Review, August 2016

The conventional wisdom for the health care sector is that idiosyncratic features leave little scope for market forces to allocate consumers to higher performance producers. However, we find robust evidence across several different conditions and performa...

The Effects of Poor Neonatal Health on Children's Cognitive Development

By David Figlio, Jonathan Guryan, Krzysztof Karbownik, and Jeffrey Roth

American Economic Review, December 2014

We make use of a new data resource -- merged birth and school records for all children born in Florida from 1992 to 2002 -- to study the relationship between birth weight and cognitive development. Using singletons as well as twin and sibling fixed eff...

Height, Health, and Cognitive Function at Older Ages

By Anne Case and Christina Paxson

American Economic Review, May 2008

Bankruptcy as Implicit Health Insurance

By Neale Mahoney

American Economic Review, February 2015

This paper examines the implicit health insurance that households receive from the ability to declare bankruptcy. Exploiting multiple sources of variation in asset exemption law, I show that uninsured households with a greater financial cost of bankrup...

War and Stature: Growing Up during the Nigerian Civil War

By Richard Akresh, Sonia Bhalotra, Marinella Leone, and Una Okonkwo Osili

American Economic Review, May 2012

The Nigerian civil war of 1967-70 was precipitated by secession of the Igbo-dominated south-eastern region to create the state of Biafra. It was the first civil war in Africa, the predecessor of many. We investigate the legacies of this war four decades l...

Healthy Bodies and Thick Wallets: The Dual Relation between Health and Economic Status

By James P. Smith

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1999

This paper sketches theoretical reasons why health may alter household savings and provides evidence on the empirical impact of health shocks on household wealth. The impacts on saving are quantitatively large and only partly explained by increased out-of...

Insuring Consumption Against Illness

By Paul Gertler and Jonathan Gruber

American Economic Review, March 2002

One of the most sizable and least predictable shocks to economic opportunities in developing countries is major illness. We investigate the extent to which families are able to insure consumption against major illness using a unique panel data set from In...

Does Forest Loss Increase Human Disease? Evidence from Nigeria

By Julia Berazneva and Tanya S. Byker

American Economic Review, May 2017

We examine the impact of forest loss on three infectious diseases attributed to modifiable environmental factors in the last decade in Nigeria. Geolinking a new high-resolution dataset of global forest change to child-level health data from the Nigeria De...

Beyond Statistics: The Economic Content of Risk Scores

By Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, Raymond Kluender, and Paul Schrimpf

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2016

"Big data" and statistical techniques to score potential transactions have transformed insurance and credit markets. In this paper, we observe that these widely-used statistical scores summarize a much richer heterogeneity, and may be endogenous to the c...