The phasedown of coal for electricity generation is considered vital to meeting global climate targets. Many countries have pledged to stop using coal, with some as early as 2030. While the United States has no target currently in place, several states do. In this paper, we examine the...

Economic policies often involve dynamic interventions, where individuals receive repeated interventions over multiple periods. This dynamics makes past responses informative to predict future responses and ultimate outcomes depend on the history of interventions. Despite these phenomena,...

Advocates in several countries have promoted a "green recovery" from the pandemic, with an emphasis on measures to address climate objectives. We evaluate proposals for the United States and find that as stated, ambitious plans to further cut emissions from transportation and electricity will...

In the presence of markup differences, externalities and other social considerations, the equilibrium direction of innovation can be systematically distorted. This paper builds a simple model of endogenous technology, which generalizes existing comparative static results and characterizes...

We study the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on chronic disease drug adherence. Focusing on asthma, we use a database that tracks the vast majority of prescription drug claims in the U.S. from 2018 to 2020. Using a difference-in-differences empirical specification, we compare monthly drug...

The Covid-19 pandemic is estimated to have caused over 7 million deaths and reduced economic output by over $13 trillion to date. While vaccines were developed and deployed with unprecedented speed, pre-pandemic investments could have accelerated their widespread introduction, saving millions of...

We review the literature on financial intermediation in the process by which new medical therapeutics are financed, developed, and delivered. We discuss the contributing factors that lead to a key finding in the literature--underinvestment in biomedical R&D--and focus on the role that banks and...

Does using prescription drugs off-label increase disability and medical expenditure? This paper uses a unique dataset to evaluate off-label vs. on-label drug use in the US non-institutionalized population. Patients using drugs off-label have on average $515 higher medical expenditure and...

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' Prescription Drug Consumer Price Index (CPI-Rx) has been the focus of considerable controversy in recent years. The CPI-Rx limits its sampling frame to transactions in retail outpatient outlets, and excludes prescription pharmaceuticals dispensed in hospitals,...

We derive the optimal funding mechanism to incentivize development and production of vaccines against diseases with epidemic potential. In the model, suppliers' costs are private information and investments are noncontractible, precluding cost-reimbursement contracts, requiring fixed-price...