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...

Policies aimed at reducing the harmful effects of air pollution exposure typically focus on areas with high levels of pollution. However, if a population's vulnerability to air pollution is imperfectly correlated with current pollution levels, then this approach to air quality regulation may not...

In many developing countries, the average firm is small, does not grow and has low productivity. Lack of market integration and limited information on non-local products often leave consumers unaware of the prices and quality of non-local firms. They therefore mostly buy locally, limiting firms'...

The recent reform of the U.S. health care system has been described both as a boon and a death blow for the healthcare industry and for private insurers in particular. We exploit the surprise election of Republican Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate, which dealt a serious blow to the prospects for...

Many developing countries use food-price subsidies or price controls to improve the nutrition of the poor. However, subsidizing goods on which households spend a high proportion of their budget can create large wealth effects. Consumers may then substitute towards foods with higher...

This paper provides the first real-world evidence of Giffen behavior, i.e., upward sloping demand. Subsidizing the prices of dietary staples for extremely poor households in two provinces of China, we find strong evidence of Giffen behavior for rice in Hunan, and weaker evidence for wheat in...

Caloric intake and minimum calorie thresholds are widely used in developing countries to assess hunger and nutrition, and to construct poverty lines. However, it is generally recognized that the sufficiency of an individual's caloric intake cannot be determined, due to: a lack of consensus on...

Using 20 years of data on Medicare beneficiaries, we predict the end-of-century mortality effects of climate change among the U.S. elderly, accounting at the ZIP code level for both adaptation and regional heterogeneity in the temperature-mortality relationship. We find that this relationship...

In rural areas of most developing countries, intergenerational coresidence is both widespread and an important determinant of well-being for the elderly. Most parents want at least one adult child to remain at home (e.g., so they can work on the family farm or provide care and assistance around...

We estimate the causal effects of acute fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) exposure on mortality and health care use among the US elderly using Medicare administrative data and a novel instrument for air pollution: changes in the local wind direction. We then develop a new methodology that uses...