Saving Social Security

[Symposium: Social Security Reform]

By Peter A. Diamond and Peter R. Orszag

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2005

Social Security is one of America's most successful government programs. It has helped millions of Americans avoid poverty in old age. To be sure, the program faces a long-term deficit and is in need of updating. But Social Security's long-term financial ...

Early Life Health Interventions and Academic Achievement

By Prashant Bharadwaj, Katrine Vellesen Løken, and Christopher Neilson

American Economic Review, August 2013

This paper studies the effect of improved early life health care on mortality and long-run academic achievement in school. We use the idea that medical treatments often follow rules of thumb for assigning care to patients, such as the classification of...

Life-Cycle Variation in the Association between Current and Lifetime Earnings

By Steven Haider and Gary Solon

American Economic Review, September 2006

Researchers in a variety of important economic literatures have assumed that current income variables as proxies for lifetime income variables follow the textbook errors-in-variables model. In our analysis of Social Security records containing nearly care...

Does It Pay to Know Prices in Health Care?

By Ethan M. J. Lieber

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2017

Consumers rarely know the price of medical care before they consume it. I use variation in the timing of access to a new source of price information to show how access to and search for price information leads consumers to pay significantly less for care....

Is American Pet Health Care (Also) Uniquely Inefficient?

By Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, and Atul Gupta

American Economic Review, May 2017

We document four similarities between American human healthcare and American pet care: (i) rapid growth in spending as a share of GDP over the last two decades; (ii) strong income-spending gradient; (iii) rapid growth in the employment of healthcare provi...

Providing Prescription Drug Coverage to the Elderly: America's Experiment with Medicare Part D

[Symposium: Health Care]

By Mark Duggan, Patrick Healy, and Fiona Scott Morton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2008

The federal government's Medicare program did not provide general prescription drug coverage for the first 40 years of its existence. Thus, more than 30 percent of the 44 million elderly and disabled beneficiaries of the program lacked insurance coverage ...

Disability Benefit Receipt and Reform: Reconciling Trends in the United Kingdom

[Symposium: Disability Insurance]

By James Banks, Richard Blundell, and Carl Emmerson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2015

The UK has enacted a number of reforms to the structure of disability benefits that has made it a major case study for other countries thinking of reform. The introduction of Incapacity Benefit in 1995 coincided with a strong decline in disability benefit...

Pharmaceuticals in U.S. Health Care: Determinants of Quantity and Price

[Symposium: Pharmaceuticals]

By Ernst R. Berndt

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2002

The U.S. pharmaceutical industry has again become the focus of considerable controversy. In understanding the economics underlying this industry, distinctions between short, medium and long-run costs are critical, as is that between economic and accountin...

Mindless Eating and Healthy Heuristics for the Irrational

By Brian Wansink, David R. Just, and Collin R. Payne

American Economic Review, May 2009

Killing Me Softly: The Fetal Origins Hypothesis

By Douglas Almond and Janet Currie

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2011

In the epidemiological literature, the fetal origins hypothesis associated with David J. Barker posits that chronic, degenerative conditions of adult health, including heart disease and type 2 diabetes, may be triggered by circumstances decades earlier, p...

Health and the Political Agency of Women

By Sonia Bhalotra and Irma Clots-Figueras

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2014

We investigate whether women's political representation in state legislatures improves public provision of antenatal and childhood health services in the districts from which they are elected, arguing that the costs of poor services in this domain fall...

The Impact of Medicaid on Labor Market Activity and Program Participation: Evidence from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment

By Katherine Baicker, Amy Finkelstein, Jae Song, and Sarah Taubman

American Economic Review, May 2014

In 2008, a group of uninsured low-income adults in Oregon was selected by lottery for the chance to apply for Medicaid. Using this randomized design and 2009 administrative data, we find no significant effect of Medicaid on employment or earnings. Our 95 ...

Health Insurance and Income Inequality

[Symposium: Inequality Beyond Income]

By Robert Kaestner and Darren Lubotsky

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2016

Health insurance and other in-kind forms of compensation and government benefits are typically not included in measures of income and analyses of inequality. This omission is important. Given the large and growing cost of health care in the United States...

The Effect of Alcohol Consumption on Mortality: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from the Minimum Drinking Age

By Christopher Carpenter and Carlos Dobkin

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2009

We estimate the effect of alcohol consumption on mortality using the minimum drinking age in a regression discontinuity design. We find large and immediate increases in drinking at age 21, including a 21 percent increase in recent drinking days. We als...

Up in Smoke: The Influence of Household Behavior on the Long-Run Impact of Improved Cooking Stoves

By Rema Hanna, Esther Duflo, and Michael Greenstone

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2016

Laboratory studies suggest that improved cooking stoves can reduce indoor air pollution, improve health, and decrease greenhouse gas emissions in developing countries. We provide evidence, from a large-scale randomized trial in India, on the benefits of a...

The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets

By M. Keith Chen

American Economic Review, April 2013

Languages differ widely in the ways they encode time. I test the hypothesis that the languages that grammatically associate the future and the present, foster future-oriented behavior. This prediction arises naturally when well-documented effects of la...

Height, Health, and Inequality: The Distribution of Adult Heights in India

By Angus Deaton

American Economic Review, May 2008

Health, Human Capital, and Life Cycle Labor Supply

By Charles Hokayem and James P. Ziliak

American Economic Review, May 2014

We use new PSID data on consumption and health, along with information on annual sick time, to estimate a structural labor supply model that incorporates a health capital stock with the traditional human capital learning-by-doing model. The estimates show...

Organizational Fragmentation and Care Quality in the U.S. Healthcare System

[Symposium: Health Care]

By Randall D. Cebul, James B. Rebitzer, Lowell J. Taylor, and Mark E. Votruba

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2008

Many goods and services can be readily provided through a series of unconnected transactions, but in health care, close coordination over time and within care episodes improves both health outcomes and efficiency. Close coordination is problematic in the ...

Saying no to energy savings

[Research Highlight]

December 01, 2017

Economics is helping to explain the energy-efficiency gap.