This paper exploits a sharp reduction in patient cost sharing at age 70 in Japan, using a regression discontinuity design to examine its effect on utilization, health, and financial risk arising from out-of-pocket expenditures. Due to the national policy, cost sharing is 60-80 percent lower at...

More than a quarter of Medicare beneficiaries are enrolled in Medicare Advantage, which was created in large part to improve the efficiency of health care delivery by promoting competition among private managed care plans. This paper explores the spillover effects of the Medicare Advantage...

This paper uses Roy's model of sorting behavior to study welfare implication of current health care data production infrastructure that relies on solicitation of research subjects. We show that due to severe adverse-selection issues, directionality of bias cannot be established and welfare may...

Adverse behavioral risk factors contribute to a large share of deaths. We examine the effects on life expectancy (LE) and quality-adjusted life expectancy (QALE) of changes in six major behavioral risk factors over the 1960-2010 period: smoking, obesity, heavy alcohol use, and unsafe use of...

Perhaps because health care is a local service sector, health economists have paid little attention to international linkages between domestic health care economies. However, the growth in domestic health care sectors is often attributed to medical innovations whose returns are earned worldwide....

This note considers a relatively new form of financing for social services, the "Social Impact Bond." Proponents of Social Impact Bonds argue that they present a solution to several problems in funding social services, including performance measurement and the distribution of risk. Using a...

Non-adherence in health care results when a patient does not initiate or continue care that a provider has recommended. Previous research identifies non-adherence as a major source of waste in US health care, totaling approximately 2.3% of GDP, and have proposed a plethora of interventions to...

There are two types of selection models in the health economics literature. One focuses on choice between a fixed set of contracts. Consumers with greater demand for medical care services prefer contracts with more generous reimbursement, resulting in a suboptimal proportion of consumers in such...

Health care providers may vertically integrate not only to facilitate coordination of care, but also for strategic reasons that may not be in patients' best interests. Optimal Medicare reimbursement policy depends upon the extent to which each of these explanations is correct. To investigate, we...

Public technology assessments in general and Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) in particular have been justified by offsetting benefits of improving patient health and reducing health care spending. However, little conceptual and empirical understanding exists concerning the quantitative...