Nonprofits supply many tax-financed services like healthcare and education. Yet nonprofits are absent from the canonical property rights theory of ownership. Extending the government "make or buy" decision to nonprofits and ex post frictions based on contracts as reference points suggests that...

We examine how health insurance expansions affect the entry and location decisions of health care clinics. Exploiting county-level changes in insurance coverage following the Affordable Care Act and 1,721 retail clinic entries and exits, we find that local increases in insurance coverage do not...

Governments in many low- and middle-income countries are developing health insurance products as a complement to tax-funded, subsidized provision of health care through publicly operated facilities. This paper discusses two rationales for this transition. First, health insurance would boost...

The contraction in health care consumption at the start of the pandemic provides insight into central economic questions of waste and productivity in the U.S. health care system. Using linked mortality and Electronic Medical Records, we compare people who had outpatient appointments scheduled...

Nearly all prior work on government outsourcing has focused on the contracting firm's incentives. This paper shows how strong incentive contracts may be insufficient to generate spending reductions (or other desired outcomes) in the presence of a binding technological or managerial constraint....

I demonstrate that to achieve dynamic efficiency, the optimal share of total surplus that a social payer should transfer to an innovating industry for a current asset depends on the marginal product of investment and the share of profits invested by the industry on the current asset and not on...

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...

Difference-in-Difference (DID) estimators are a valuable method for identifying causal effects in the public health researcher's toolkit. A growing methods literature points out potential problems with DID estimators when treatment is staggered in adoption and varies with time. Despite this, no...

High administrative costs in U.S. health care have provoked concern among policymakers over potential waste, but many of these costs are generated by managed care policies that trade off bureaucratic costs against reductions in moral hazard. We study this trade-off for prior authorization...

Variation in technology adoption is a key driver of differences in productivity. Previous studies sought to explain variations in technology adoption by heterogeneity in profitability, costs of adoption, or other factors. Less is known about how adoption is affected by bias in the perceived...