The COVID-19 pandemic has forced federal, state and local policymakers to respond by legislating, enacting, and enforcing social distancing policies. However, the impact of these policies on healthcare utilization in the United States has been largely unexplored. We examine the impact of...

Recent breakthroughs in the treatment of HIV have coincided with an increase in infection rates and an eventual slowing of reductions in HIV mortality. These trends may be causally related, if treatment improves the health and functional status of HIV+ individuals and allows them to engage in...

Recent evidence suggests that Medicare Part D has increased prescription drug use among the elderly, and earlier studies have indicated that increasing market size induces pharmaceutical innovation. This paper assesses the impact of Medicare Part D on pharmaceutical research and development...

We examine provider responses to the Medicare inpatient rehabilitation facility (IRF) prospective payment system (PPS), which simultaneously reduced marginal reimbursement and increased average reimbursement. IRFs could respond to the PPS by changing the total number of patients admitted,...

Estimates of the returns to medical care may reflect not only the efficacy of more intensive care, but also unmeasured differences in patient severity or the productivity of health-care providers. We use a variety of instruments that are plausibly orthogonal to heterogeneity among providers as...

There are two salient facts about health care in low and middle-income countries; 1) the private sector plays an important role and 2) the care provided is often of poor quality. Despite these facts we know little about what drives quality of care in the private sector and why patients continue...

This paper investigates the effects of health insurance and new antiviral treatments on HIV testing rates among the U.S. general population using nationally representative data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey (BRFSS) for the years 1993 to 2002. We estimate recursive bivariate...