For decades, the US public and private sectors have committed substantial resources towards cancer research, but the societal payoff has not been well-understood. We quantify the value of recent gains in cancer survival, and analyze the distribution of value among various stakeholders. Between...

Background. In Spain's "MIR" system of allocating residency training positions, medical school graduates are ranked according to their performance on a national exam and then sequentially choose from the remaining available training slots. We studied how changes in the MIR system might address...

We report on a large randomized controlled trial of hospital insurance for above-poverty-line Indian households. Households were assigned to free insurance, sale of insurance, sale plus cash transfer, or control. To estimate spillovers, the fraction of households offered insurance varied across...

This paper investigates the local impact of biomedical research on mortality in the USA. Causally estimating the marginal value of biomedical research is challenging due to a lack of micro data linking health outcomes to plausibly exogenous variation in research. We create a new linkage between...

This paper explores the economic incentives for medical procedure innovation. Using a proprietary dataset on billing code applications for emerging medical procedures, we highlight two mechanisms that could hinder innovation. First, the administrative hurdle of securing permanent, reimbursable...

The "shutdown" economy of April 2020 is compared to a normally functioning economy both in terms of market and nonmarket activities. Three novel methods and data indicate that the shutdown puts market production 25-28 percent below normal in the short run. At an annual rate, the shutdown is...

Academic Medical Centers (AMCs)--comprising medical schools, teaching hospitals, and research laboratories)--play an important role in US biomedical innovation. The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 (BBA) changed the formula used to reimburse Medicare inpatient claims and subsidies for medical...

Recent policy attention has focused on proposals to reduce prices for drugs that have received public funding. From an implementation perspective, such policies rely on public disclosure of government support for research. In this paper, we highlight two conceptual problems with past attempts to...