Many public programs let individuals choose between publicly provided benefits and a subsidized private alternative. We investigate the determinants of health insurance choice in Medicare--a setting with vast geographic variation in the share of individuals selecting the public option versus...

We analyze the financial performance of a hypothetical portfolio of 120 mRNA vaccine candidates in the preclinical stage targeting 11 emerging infectious diseases. We calibrate the simulation parameters with input from domain experts in mRNA technology and an extensive literature review. We find...

Health plans for the poor increasingly limit access to specialty hospitals. We investigate the role of adverse selection in generating this equilibrium among private plans in Medicaid. Studying a network change, we find that covering a top cancer hospital causes severe adverse selection,...

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...

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...

Using data on U.S. state and federal taxes and transfers over a quarter century, we estimate a regression model that yields the marginal effect of any shift of market income share from one quintile to another on the entire post tax, post-transfer income distribution. We identify exogenous income...

Health insurance is increasingly provided through managed competition, in which subsidies for consumers and risk adjustment for insurers are key market design instruments. We illustrate that subsidies offer two advantages over risk adjustment in markets with adverse selection. They provide...

We revisit the cyclical nature of birth rates and infant health and investigate to what extent the relationship between aggregate labor market conditions and birth outcomes is mitigated by the consumption smoothing income assistance delivered through unemployment insurance (UI). We introduce a...

The Medicare hospice program is intended to provide palliative care to terminal patients, but patients with long stays in hospice are highly profitable, motivating concerns about overuse among the Alzheimer's and Dementia (ADRD) population in the rapidly growing for-profit sector. We provide the...

We assess the impacts of a randomized school-based deworming intervention in Kenya on the mortality of recipients' children using a 23-year longitudinal data set of over 6,500 original participants and their offspring. The under-5 mortality rate fell by 22% (17 deaths per 1000 live births) for...