Another Look at the Impacts of Health Reform in Massachusetts: Evidence Using New Data and a Stronger Model

By Sharon K. Long, Karen Stockley, and Alshadye Yemane

American Economic Review, May 2009

Human Development in Poor Countries: On the Role of Private Incomes and Public Services

By Sudhir Anand and Martin Ravallion

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1993

Development is often taken to mean rising incomes. Discussions of the "goals of development" now often emphasize the reduction of poverty, rather than raising average incomes per se. The role of social services—particularly basic health and educatio...

Health and the Economy in the United States from 1750 to the Present

By Dora L. Costa

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2015

I discuss the health transition in the United States, bringing new data to bear on health indicators and investigating the changing relationship between health, income, and the environment. I argue that scientific advances played an outsize role and that ...

Public Finance Principles and National Health Care Reform

[Symposium: Health Care Reform]

By Richard Zeckhauser

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1994

Public finance principles, though usually treated as a minor consideration, lie at the heart of effective national health care reform. Four principles are discussed: charge for a service where its cost is created; distinguish rents, resources, and transfe...

Is the Obesity Epidemic a Public Health Problem? A Review of Zoltan J. Acs and Alan Lyles's Obesity, Business and Public Policy

By Tomas J. Philipson and Richard A. Posner

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2008

We review the recent but growing economic literature on the worldwide growth of obesity, relating the review to a recent anthology of articles—Obesity, Business and Public Policy. We discuss the competing explanations for the growth of obes...

Government-Academic Partnerships in Randomized Evaluations: The Case of Inappropriate Prescribing

By Adam Sacarny, David Yokum, and Shantanu Agrawal

American Economic Review, May 2017

There is growing evidence that inappropriate prescribing is harming patients and raising costs in the US health care system. Through a partnership between the federal government and academics, we seek to develop evidence on reducing this prescribing. We c...

Are Health Insurance Markets Competitive?

By Leemore S. Dafny

American Economic Review, September 2010

To gauge the competitiveness of the group health insurance industry, I investigate whether health insurers charge higher premiums, ceteris paribus, to more profitable firms. Such "direct price discrimination" is feasible only in imperfectly competitive se...

Causal Spousal Health Spillover Effects and Implications for Program Evaluation

By Jason Fletcher and Ryne Marksteiner

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2017

Current methods of cost effectiveness analysis implicitly assume zero spillovers among social ties. This can underestimate the benefits of health interventions and misallocate resources toward interventions with lower comprehensive effects. We discuss the...

Will Public Sector Retiree Health Benefit Plans Survive? Economic and Policy Implications of Unfunded Liabilities

By Robert L. Clark

American Economic Review, May 2009

A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter

By Claudia Goldin

American Economic Review, April 2014

The converging roles of men and women are among the grandest advances in society and the economy in the last century. These aspects of the grand gender convergence are figurative chapters in a history of gender roles. But what must the "last" chapter c...

Is There a Link between Foreclosure and Health?

By Janet Currie and Erdal Tekin

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2015

We investigate the relationship between foreclosures and hospital visits using data on all foreclosures and all hospital and emergency room visits from four states that were among the hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis. We find that living in a neighbo...

What Does Health Reform Mean for the Health Care Industry? Evidence from the Massachusetts Special Senate Election

By Mohamad M. Al-Ississ and Nolan H. Miller

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2013

We exploit the surprise election of Republican Scott Brown to the US Senate to evaluate the market's assessment of the impact of the recent US health reform legislation on the health care industry. We find that Brown's election was associated with abnorma...

Income, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and Infant Health

By Hilary Hoynes, Doug Miller, and David Simon

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2015

This paper uses quasi-experimental variation from federal tax reform to evaluate the effect of the EITC on infant health outcomes. We find that the EITC reduces the incidence of low birth weight and increases mean birth weight: a $1,000 treatment-on-the-t...

Regulatory Redistribution in the Market for Health Insurance

By Jeffrey Clemens

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2015

Community-rating regulations equalize the insurance premiums faced by the healthy and the unhealthy. Intended reductions in the unhealthy's premiums can be undone, however, if the healthy forgo coverage. The severity of this adverse selection problem hing...

The Best of Times, the Worst of Times: Understanding Pro-cyclical Mortality

By Ann H. Stevens, Douglas L. Miller, Marianne E. Page, and Mateusz Filipski

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2015

It is well-known that mortality rates are pro-cyclical. In this paper, we attempt to understand why. We find little evidence that cyclical changes in individuals' own employment-related behavior drives the relationship; own-group employment rates are not ...

Can Higher Prices Stimulate Product Use? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Zambia

By Nava Ashraf, James Berry, and Jesse M. Shapiro

American Economic Review, December 2010

The controversy over how much to charge for health products in the developing world rests, in part, on whether higher prices can increase use, either by targeting distribution to high-use households (a screening effect), or by stimulating use psychologic...

Health, Inequality, and Economic Development

By Angus Deaton

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2003

I discuss mechanisms linking health and inequality and review evidence for effects of income inequality on aggregate and individual mortality, over time and over space. I conclude that there is no direct link. Correlations come from factors other than inc...

Ethnic Attrition and the Observed Health of Later-Generation Mexican Americans

By Francisca Antman, Brian Duncan, and Stephen J. Trejo

American Economic Review, May 2016

Numerous studies find that U.S.-born Hispanics differ significantly from non-Hispanic whites on important measures of human capital, including health. Nevertheless, almost all studies rely on subjective measures of ethnic self-identification to identify i...

Convergence in Adaptation to Climate Change: Evidence from High Temperatures and Mortality, 1900-2004

By Alan Barreca, Karen Clay, Olivier Deschênes, Michael Greenstone, and Joseph S. Shapiro

American Economic Review, May 2015

This paper combines panel data on monthly mortality rates of US states and daily temperature variables for over a century (1900-2004) to explore the regional evolution of the temperature-mortality relationship and documents two key findings. First, the im...

The Composition and Drawdown of Wealth in Retirement

[Symposium: After Retirement]

By James Poterba, Steven Venti, and David Wise

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2011

This paper presents evidence on the resources available to households as they enter retirement. It draws heavily on data collected by the Health and Retirement Study. We calculate the "potential additional annuity income" that households could purchase, g...