Many opioid control policies target the prescribing behavior of health care providers. In this paper, we study the first comprehensive state-level policy requiring providers to access patients' opioid history before making prescribing decisions. We compare prescribers in Kentucky, which...

Overuse of medical care is often attributed to an informed expert problem, whereby doctors induce patients to purchase unnecessary treatments. Alternatively, patients may drive overuse of medications by exerting pressure on doctors to overprescribe, undermining the doctor's gatekeeping function...

Beginning around 1990, academic medical centers have ceased to be the primary locus of industry-sponsored clinical trial activity. Instead, clinical trials have increasingly been conducted in private practices and for-profit, dedicated study sites. We examine the underlying causes of this...

Inefficiency in the U.S. health care system has often been characterized as "flat of the curve" spending providing little or no incremental value. In this paper, we draw on macroeconomic models of diffusion and productivity to better explain the empirical patterns of outcome improvements in...

We analyze data from the Health and Retirement Study on senior citizens' take-up of Medicare Part D. Take-up among those without drug coverage in 2004 was high; about fifty to sixty percent of this group have Part D coverage in 2006. Only seven percent of senior citizens lack drug coverage in...

Consumerism arises when patients acquire and use medical information from sources apart from their physicians, such as the Internet and direct-to-patient advertising. Consumerism has been hailed as a means of improving quality. This need not be the result. Consumerist patients place additional...

Recent evidence suggests that Medicare Part D has increased prescription drug use among the elderly, and earlier studies have indicated that increasing market size induces pharmaceutical innovation. This paper assesses the impact of Medicare Part D on pharmaceutical research and development...

Does drug treatment for depression with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) increase or decrease the risk of completed suicide? The question is important in part because of recent government warnings that question the safety of SSRIs, one of the most widely prescribed medications in...

The classic theory of moral hazard concerns the insurance of a single good and predicts that co-insurance is larger when the elasticity of demand is higher and when small risks are insured. We extend this analysis to the insurance of multiple goods; for example, the simultaneous insurance of...