We study the effect of price caps on the provision of costly effort by pharmaceutical firms using variation in drug discounts generated by a price regulation program that allows eligible hospitals to purchase outpatient drugs at steep discounts. These discounts directly affect drug...

Since the inception of Medicare Part D in 2006, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and regulatory changes have led to increased concentration and reduced plan variety in the standalone prescription drug plan (PDP) portion of the market. We examine how this industry consolidation affects Medicare...

We study the effect of mandates requiring COVID-19 vaccination among healthcare industry workers adopted in 2021 in the United States. There are long-standing worker shortages in the U.S. healthcare industry, pre-dating the COVID-19 pandemic. The impact of COVID-19 vaccine mandates on shortages...

This paper examines whether loss of locally available hospital-based obstetric services affects racial/ethnic disparities in intrapartum care access and birth outcomes in rural areas of the US. To conduct causal inference, we combine difference-in-difference and propensity score matching methods...

The pharmaceutical market has experienced a massive wave of vertical integration between pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) and health insurers in recent years. Using a unique dataset on insurer-PBM contracts, we document increasing vertical integration in Medicare Part D-vertically integrated...

This paper examines the tradeoffs of monitoring for wasteful public spending. By penalizing unnecessary spending, monitoring improves the quality of public expenditure and incentivizes firms to invest in compliance technology. I study a large Medicare program that monitored for unnecessary...

Opioid overdose deaths in older adults have increased substantially over the past two decades. This increase has occurred despite the availability of effective treatments. Methadone, one of just three medications approved by the Food & Drug Administration for opioid use disorder (OUD) treatment,...

We study the role of physicians in driving geographic variation of US healthcare utilization. We estimate a model that separates variation in average utilization of Medicare beneficiaries due to physicians, non-physician supply side factors, and patient demand. The model is identified by...

Hospitals play a key role in patient outcomes and spending, but efforts to improve their quality are hindered because we do not know whether hospital quality indicators are causal or biased. We evaluate the validity of commonly used quality indicators, such as mortality, readmissions, inpatient...

Moral hazard and provider-induced demand may contribute to overutilization of scarce health care resources. The U.S. health care system includes several compensatory cost-containment mechanisms, but their effects depend on how patients and providers respond. We investigate hospice programs'...