Fragmented healthcare received from many different physicians results in higher costs and lower quality, but does it contribute to dangerous opioid prescribing? The effect is theoretically ambiguous because fragmentation can trigger costly coordination failures but also permits greater...

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...

Mortality rates in the US fell more rapidly during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries than any other period in American history. This decline coincided with an epidemiological transition and the disappearance of a mortality "penalty" associated with living in urban areas. There is little...

The conventional wisdom in health economics is that idiosyncratic features of the healthcare sector leave little scope for market forces to allocate consumers to higher performance producers. However, we find robust evidence across a variety of conditions and performance measures that higher...

Adverse behavioral risk factors contribute to a large share of deaths. We examine the effects on life expectancy (LE) and quality-adjusted life expectancy (QALE) of changes in six major behavioral risk factors over the 1960-2010 period: smoking, obesity, heavy alcohol use, and unsafe use of...

The conventional wisdom in health economics is that large differences in average productivity across hospitals are the result of idiosyncratic, institutional features of the healthcare sector which dull the role of market forces. Strikingly, however, we find that productivity dispersion in heart...

Firms often exploit loopholes in government contracts to boost revenues. The welfare consequences of this behavior depend on how firms use the marginal windfall dollar, yet little evidence exists to guide policymakers. This paper studies how hospitals allocated over $3 billion obtained from...

The potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to simplify existing healthcare processes and create new, more efficient ones is a major topic of discussion in the industry. Yet healthcare lags other industries in AI adoption. In this paper, we estimate that wider adoption of AI could lead to...