We analyze the economic consequences of rising health care prices in the US. Using exposure to price increases caused by horizontal hospital mergers as an instrument, we show that rising prices raise the cost of labor by increasing employer-sponsored health insurance premiums. A 1% increase in...

Using newly digitized U.S. city-level data on hospitals, we explore how pandemics alter preferences for healthcare. We find that cities with higher levels of mortality during the Great Influenza of 1918-1919 subsequently expanded hospital capacity by more than cities experiencing less influenza...

The past century witnessed a dramatic improvement in public health, the rise of modern medicine, and the transformation of the hospital from a fringe institution to one essential to the practice of medicine. In this paper, we explore how access to the hospital and modern medicine affects...

Prior to around 2011, there was a pronounced curvilinear relationship between age and wellbeing: poor mental health was hump-shaped with respect to age, whilst subjective well-being was U-shaped. We examine data from a European panel for France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden called,...

We compute new estimates for Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth in five European countries and in the United States. Departing from standard methods, we account for positive profits and use firm surveys to proxy for unobserved changes in factor utilization. These novelties have a major...

The Global Repository of Income Dynamics (GRID) is a new open-access, cross- country database that contains a wide range of micro statistics on income inequality, dynamics, and mobility. It has four key characteristics: it is built on micro panel data drawn from administrative records; it fully...

This paper studies the effectiveness of forward guidance when central banks have imperfect credibility. Exploiting unique survey-based measures of expected inflation, output growth, and interest rates, we estimate a small-scale New Keynesian model for the United States and other G7 countries...

We investigate the employment consequences of deindustrialization for 1,993 cities in France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, and the United States. In all six countries we find a strong negative relationship between a city's share of manufacturing employment in the year of its country's...

This paper studies to what extent the transfer of US managerial technologies to Europe after World War II contributed to closing the gap with US businesses. Between 1952 and 1958, the US government sponsored the Productivity Program, which promoted management training trips for European managers...

German municipalities levy local business taxes by choosing a tax rate to apply to local business income, where the tax base is defined uniformly at the national level. Before the federal government's imposition of a minimum tax rate in 2004, some municipalities such as the tiny North Sea town...