How responsive to health shocks are healthcare systems in the developing world? Developing countries are known to have both lower levels of hospital infrastructure and serious health shocks driven by air pollution. These shocks are transitory and may be marginal relative to other health demands,...

Public health interventions often involve a trade-off between improving health and protecting individual rights. We study this trade-off in a high-stakes setting: prostitution regulations aimed at reducing the spread of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in Victorian Britain. These...

Governments in many low- and middle-income countries are developing health insurance products as a complement to tax-funded, subsidized provision of health care through publicly operated facilities. This paper discusses two rationales for this transition. First, health insurance would boost...

Worker shortages are common in many industries. This paper examines the effect of government subsidies to address these shortages in the context of a reform that tied Medicaid payments to nursing home staffing levels. We find that the reform substantially increased staffing, especially for...

Technological innovation in medical services can improve health, but its ability to reach patients often depends on price signals for downstream providers, which can also be discordant across production inputs. We examine such a context when Medicare sharply revises facility fees--while holding...

Many centralized assignment systems seek to not only provide good matches for participants' current needs, but also to accommodate changes in preferences and circumstances. We study the problem of designing a dynamic reassignment mechanism in the context of Norway's system for allocating...

Firms often exploit loopholes in government contracts to boost revenues. The welfare consequences of this behavior depend on how firms use the marginal windfall dollar, yet little evidence exists to guide policymakers. This paper studies how hospitals allocated over $3 billion obtained from...

The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly affected the United States healthcare system, resulting in major disruptions in the delivery of essential care and causing crippling financial losses that threaten the viability of millions of medical practices. There is little empirical evidence on the types...

Over the last few decades, health care services in the United States have become more centralized. We study how the loss of hospital-based obstetric units in over 400 rural counties affect maternal and infant health via a difference-in-differences design. We find that closures lead to...