Specialty hospitals tend to negotiate higher commercial insurance payments, even for relatively routine procedures with comparable clinical quality across hospital types. How specialty hospitals can maintain such a price premium remains an open question. In this paper, we examine a potential...

This paper shows that product design shapes search frictions and that intermediaries leverage this channel to increase their rents in the context of the U.S. municipal bond market. The majority of bonds are designed via negotiations between a local government and its underwriter. They are then...

Health insurers often tie payments to providers' quality of care. Although payers do this to elicit more effort from providers, some providers may game the system by avoiding patients who would cause their quality scores to fall. We use annual variation in the criteria for Medicare's Quality...

High-speed internet has increased the amount of information available in health care markets. Online information may improve health outcomes if it reduces information frictions and helps patients choose higher quality providers or causes providers to improve quality. We examine how health...

Health insurance plans in the U.S. increasingly use price mechanisms to steer demand for prescription drugs. The effectiveness of these incentives, however, depends both on physicians' price sensitivity and their knowledge of patient prices. We develop a moment inequality model that allows...

Consumer reviews, especially those expressing concerns of product quality, are crucial for the credibility of online platforms. However, reviews that criticize a product or service may also dissuade buyers from using the platform, creating an incentive to blur the visibility of critical reviews....

We develop a stylized model that allows us to estimate a value-added measure for nursing homes ("SNFs") which accounts for patient selection both into and out of a SNF. We use the model, together with detailed data on the physical and mental health of about 6 million Medicare SNF patients...

Physicians commonly receive marketing-related transfers from drug firms. We examine the impact of these relationships on the prescribing of physician-administered cancer drugs in Medicare. We find that prescribing of the associated drug increases 4\% in the twelve months after a payment is...

The United States spends twice as much per person on pharmaceuticals as European countries, in large part because prices are much higher in the US. This fact has led policymakers to consider legislation for price controls. This paper assesses the effects of a US international reference pricing...