Marginal prices fell, and disposable incomes increased, for drug and alcohol consumers during the pandemic. Most of the amount, timing, and composition of the 240,000 deaths involving alcohol and drugs since early 2020 can be explained by income effects and category-specific price changes. For...

Were workers more likely to be infected by COVID-19 in their workplace, or outside it? While both economic models of the pandemic and public health policy recommendations often presume that the workplace is less safe, this paper seeks an answer both in micro data and economic theory. The...

Almost exactly two years ago COVID-19 spread to the United States. Following the federalism model, the 50 states and their governors and legislators made many of their own pandemic policy choices to mitigate the damage from the virus. States learned from one another over time about what policies...

We examine the effect of the Great Recession of 2007-2009 on the mental health of older adults, using longitudinal Health and Retirement Study data linked to area-level data on house prices. We use a variety of measures to capture mental health and rely on the very large cross-sectional...

This paper revisits Peltzman (1973) in light of two recent opportunities to quantitatively assess tradeoffs in drug regulation. First, reduced regulatory barriers to drug manufacturing associated with the 2017 reauthorization of Generic Drug User Fee Amendments were followed by significantly...

Estimating medical care productivity is a central economic challenge. This paper develops a satellite account for the US health sector that appropriately measures health care productivity and applies that to the elderly population between 1999 and 2012. The central output of the satellite...

A substantial literature has studied the influence of malpractice pressure on physician behavior. However, these studies generally focus on malpractice pressure stemming from state laws that govern liability exposure, which may be unknown or not salient to physicians. We test how physicians...

Recent literature on the relationship between ethnic or racial segregation and outcomes has failed to produce a consensus view of the role of ghettos; some studies suggest that residence in an enclave is beneficial, some reach the opposite conclusion, and still others imply that any relationship...

In the past few decades, some measures of population risk have improved, while others have deteriorated. Understanding the health of the population requires integrating these different trends. We compare the risk factor profile of the population in the early 1970s with that of the population in...