After Midnight: A Regression Discontinuity Design in Length of Postpartum Hospital Stays

By Douglas Almond and Joseph J. Doyle

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2011

Estimates of moral hazard in health insurance markets can be confounded by adverse selection. This paper considers a plausibly exogenous source of variation in insurance coverage for childbirth in California. We find that additional health insurance cover...

Neuroeconomic Foundations of Economic Choice--Recent Advances

[Symposium: Neuroeconomics]

By Ernst Fehr and Antonio Rangel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2011

Neuroeconomics combines methods and theories from neuroscience psychology, economics, and computer science in an effort to produce detailed computational and neurobiological accounts of the decision-making process that can serve as a common foundation for...

Should Aid Reward Performance? Evidence from a Field Experiment on Health and Education in Indonesia

By Benjamin A. Olken, Junko Onishi, and Susan Wong

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2014

We report an experiment in 3,000 villages that tested whether incentives improve aid efficacy. Villages received block grants for maternal and child health and education that incorporated relative performance incentives. Subdistricts were randomized into ...

The Impact of the Massachusetts Health Care Reform on Health Care Use among Children

By Sarah Miller

American Economic Review, May 2012

In 2006 Massachusetts enacted a major health care reform aimed at achieving near-universal coverage in the state. While other studies have found that this reform substantially affected the use of health services in general, the impact of the reform on chi...

An Assessment of TARP Assistance to Financial Institutions

[Symposium: The Bailouts of 2007-2009]

By Charles W. Calomiris and Urooj Khan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2015

Six years after the passage of the 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program, commonly known as TARP, it remains hard to measure the total social costs and benefits of the assistance to banks provided under TARP programs. TARP was not a single approach to assist...

Identifying the Disadvantaged: Official Poverty, Consumption Poverty, and the New Supplemental Poverty Measure

By Bruce D. Meyer and James X. Sullivan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2012

We discuss poverty measurement, focusing on two alternatives to the current official measure: consumption poverty, and the Census Bureau's new Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) that was released for the first time last year. The SPM has advantages over ...

Traffic Congestion and Infant Health: Evidence from E-ZPass

By Janet Currie and Reed Walker

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2011

We exploit the introduction of electronic toll collection, (E-ZPass), which greatly reduced both traffic congestion and vehicle emissions near highway toll plazas. We show that the introduction of E-ZPass reduced prematurity and low birth weight among mo...

Beyond BA Blinders: Lessons from Occupational Colleges and Certificate Programs for Nontraditional Students

[Symposium: Early and Later Interventions]

By James E. Rosenbaum and Janet Rosenbaum

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2013

Postsecondary education mostly focuses on the four-year BA degree. Community colleges are often promoted as the first step toward the ultimate goal of a four-year degree. However, community colleges have extremely poor degree completion rates. There is ev...

Disability Insurance and the Dynamics of the Incentive Insurance Trade-Off

By Hamish Low and Luigi Pistaferri

American Economic Review, October 2015

We provide a life-cycle framework for comparing insurance and disincentive effects of disability benefits. The risks that individuals face and the parameters of the Disability Insurance (DI) program are estimated from consumption, health, disability insur...

Long-Term Neighborhood Effects on Low-Income Families: Evidence from Moving to Opportunity

By Jens Ludwig, Greg J. Duncan, Lisa A. Gennetian, Lawrence F. Katz, Ronald C. Kessler, Jeffrey R. Kling, and Lisa Sanbonmatsu

American Economic Review, May 2013

We examine long-term neighborhood effects on low-income families using data from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) randomized housing-mobility experiment. This experiment offered to some public-housing families but not to others the chance to move to less-d...

Health Care Costs: On the Rise Again

By Sherry Glied

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2003

Since 1999, health care costs have been growing faster than national income. This rapid growth has occurred as the ability of private and public purchasers to reduce service utilization and bargain for lower prices has fallen, insurers have recouped lost ...

Human Capital Investment and the Gender Division of Labor in a Brawn-Based Economy

By Mark M. Pitt, Mark R. Rosenzweig, and Mohammad Nazmul Hassan

American Economic Review, December 2012

A model of human capital investment and activity choice is used to explain facts describing gender differentials in the levels and returns to human capital investments and occupational choice. These include the higher return to and level of schooling, the...

Why Don't the Poor Save More? Evidence from Health Savings Experiments

By Pascaline Dupas and Jonathan Robinson

American Economic Review, June 2013

Using data from a field experiment in Kenya, we document that providing individuals with simple informal savings technologies can substantially increase investment in preventative health and reduce vulnerability to health shocks. Simply providing a safe...

Who Pays for Obesity?

By Jay Bhattacharya and Neeraj Sood

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2011

Adult obesity is a growing problem. From 1962 to 2006, obesity prevalence nearly tripled to 35.1 percent of adults. The rising prevalence of obesity is not limited to a particular socioeconomic group and is not unique to the United States. Should this wid...

The Trillion Dollar Conundrum: Complementarities and Health Information Technology

By David Dranove, Chris Forman, Avi Goldfarb, and Shane Greenstein

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2014

We examine the heterogeneous relationship between the adoption of EMR and hospital operating costs at thousands of US hospitals between 1996 and 2009. We first document a previously-identified puzzle: Adoption of EMR is associated with a slight cost incre...

Heuristics and Heterogeneity in Health Insurance Exchanges: Evidence from the Massachusetts Connector

By Keith Marzilli Ericson and Amanda Starc

American Economic Review, May 2012

We examine heuristic decision rules in consumer choice on health insurance exchanges using data from the Massachusetts Connector. Consumers may have difficulty making optimal choices in a complex environment. The heuristic "choose the cheapest plan" is s...

Converging to American: Healthy Immigrant Effect in Children of Immigrants

By Mónica García-Pérez

American Economic Review, May 2016

We analyze children of immigrants' healthy immigrant effect using parental year of arrival and region of birth. Using data from Integrated National Health Interview Survey 2008-2014, we evaluate children of immigrants' health status by using obesity rates...

Financial Incentives, Hospital Care, and Health Outcomes: Evidence from Fair Pricing Laws

By Michael Batty and Benedic Ippolito

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2017

State laws that limit how much hospitals are paid by uninsured patients provide a unique opportunity to study how financial incentives of health care providers affect the care they deliver. We estimate the laws reduce payments from uninsured patients by 2...

Dynamic Inefficiencies in an Employment-Based Health Insurance System: Theory and Evidence

By Hanming Fang and Alessandro Gavazza

American Economic Review, December 2011

We investigate the effects of the institutional settings of the US health care system on individuals' life-cycle medical expenditures. Health is a form of general human capital; labor turnover and labor-market frictions prevent an employer-employee pair ...

Socioeconomic Status and Child Health: Why Is the Relationship Stronger for Older Children?

By Janet Currie and Mark Stabile

American Economic Review, December 2003