Liquidity Constraints and the Value of Insurance

By Keith M. Ericson and Justin Sydnor

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

Insurance moves resources across both time and states. We study the consumptionsmoothing benefits of insurance under liquidity constraints in a model where contracts span multiple consumption periods. The normative benchmarks for insurance demand under...

Prioritizing Benefit? How Low-Income Patients Respond to Prescription Cost-Sharing

By Christopher Hollrah

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

This paper measures how cost-sharing impacts older low-income patients, exploiting a disconti-nuity in eligibility for a prescription drug subsidy for those who lose access to the Medicaid-linked program. Higher drug prices resulting from subsidy loss lea...

Childhood Health Shocks and the Intergenerational Transmission of Inequality

By Tine M. Eriksen, Amanda P. Gaulke, Jannet Svensson, Niels Skipper, and Peter R. Thingholm

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

This paper documents a socioeconomic gradient in adult labor market penalties stemming from a single chronic and treatable childhood health shock in a country with universal access to healthcare. Using childhood onset Type 1 Diabetes, Danish administrat...

Navigating the college choice process

[Research Highlight]

December 15, 2025

Intensive advising can substantially increase the likelihood of degree attainment for low-income students.

Breaking Bad: How Health Shocks Prompt Crime

By Steffen Andersen, Elin Colmsjö, Gianpaolo Parise, and Kim Peijnenburg

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2026

Exploiting plausibly exogenous variations in the timing of cancer diagnoses, we establish that health shocks elicit a large and persistent increase in the probability of committing a crime. This effect materializes in a substantial rise in both first crim...

Risk Preferences and Field Behavior: The Relevance of Higher-Order Risk Preferences

By Sebastian O. Schneider and Matthias Sutter

American Economic Review, January 2026

Using new methods, we measure the intensities of higher-order risk preferences (prudence and temperance) in an incentivized experiment with 658 adolescents. Aligned with theory, we find that higher-order risk preferences are strongly related to field beha...

National Institutes of Health (NIH) Mission-Driven Health Economics: Engaging Emerging Opportunities and Removing Barriers to Innovation

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Selection, Structural Transformation, and the Cost Disease of Services

By Martin Shu

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

Labor productivity growth in the service sector may be mismeasured if workers with heterogeneous skills self-select into sectors. I document with U.S. data that workers reallocated from manufacturing earn more than incumbent workers in professional ser...

Effects of Parental Death on Labor Market Outcomes

By Mathias Fjællegaard Jensen and Ning Zhang

American Economic Review

We use Danish administrative data to examine the effects of parental death on labor market outcomes. Leveraging the timing of sudden, first parental deaths and a matched-control difference-in-differences strategy, we find that men's earnings decline by 2%...

Geographic Variation in Mental Health Treatment Utilization: Evidence from Migration

By Hui Ding

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2026

The older population bears a heavy burden of mental illness. Despite the availability of effective treatments, including services (e.g., psychotherapy) and drugs (e.g., antidepressants, antipsychotics), this paper documents substantial geographic variatio...

Invisible Wounds: How Mental Disability Benefits Shape Veteran Well-Being

By David Silver and Jonathan Zhang

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2026

We study impacts of VA disability compensation on the health and well-being of the large and rapidly growing population of veterans claiming mental disorders. We leverage quasi-random assignment of veterans to medical examiners with varying assessing tend...

Hacked to Pieces? The Effects of Ransomware Attacks on Hospitals and Patients

By Hannah Neprash, Claire McGlave, and Sayeh Nikpay

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2026

As cybercriminals increasingly target health care, hospitals face the growing threat of ransomware attacks. Ransomware is a type of malicious software that prevents users from accessing electronic systems and demands a ransom to restore access. We create ...

Kathrin Durizzo on corruption and health care

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Does improving patients’ knowledge reduce petty corruption by healthcare providers in developing countries?

Lucy Wang on health IT diffusion

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How does health information technology adoption affect healthcare access?

The hidden social costs of cancer

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A Danish study shows that an adverse health shock increases the chances of criminal behavior.

From Asia, with Skills

[Symposium: Asian Americans]

By Gaurav Khanna

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2026

This paper examines the rise of high-skill migration from Asia to the United States since 1990 and its consequences for sending and receiving economies. Over 1990–2019, migrants from India, China, South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines accounted for ov...

Family Institutions and the Global Fertility Transition

[Symposium: Fertility Rates]

By Paula E. Gobbi, Anne Hannusch, and Pauline Rossi

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2026

Much of the observed cross-country variation in fertility aligns with the predictions of classic theories of the fertility transition: countries with higher levels of human capital, higher GDP per capita, or lower mortality rates tend to exhibit lower fer...

Doctor Decision-Making and Patient Outcomes

By Janet Currie, W. Bentley MacLeod, and Kate Musen

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2026

Doctors often treat similar patients differently, which affects health outcomes and medical spending. We assess the recent literature on doctor decision-making through the lens of a model that incorporates diagnostic and procedural skills, beliefs, incent...

W. E. B. Du Bois and Economics: A Reappraisal

By Guy Numa and Sammy Zahran

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2026

W. E. B. Du Bois is widely considered one of the most prominent American intellectuals of the twentieth century. While Du Bois has been praised for his contributions to sister disciplines, his contributions to economics have been underappreciated. Drawing...

The Value of Clean Water: Experimental Evidence from Rural India

By Fiona Burlig, Amir Jina, and Anant Sudarshan

American Economic Review, March 2026

Over 2 billion people lack clean drinking water. Existing solutions face high costs (piped water) or low demand (point-of-use chlorine). Using a 60,000 household cluster-randomized experiment, we test an alternative approach: decentralized treatment and h...