This study investigates whether minimum wage increases in the United States affect an important non-market outcome: worker health. To study this question, we use data on lesser-skilled workers from the 1993-2014 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Surveys coupled with differences-in-differences...

We examine how substance use disorder (SUD) treatment providers respond to private health insurance expansions induced by state equal coverage ('parity') laws for SUD treatment. We use data on the near universe of specialty SUD treatment providers in the United States between 1997 and 2010 in an...

This analysis uses data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) and the Survey on Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) to assess the effect of ageing and health on the life satisfaction of the oldest old (defined as 75 and older). We observe a U-shaped relationship between age...

Many developed countries have recently experienced sharp increases in home birth rates. This paper investigates the impact of home births on the health of low-risk newborns using data from the Netherlands, the only developed country where home births are widespread. To account for endogeneity in...

Using a randomized field experiment, we show that health care specialists cream-skim patients by their expected profitability. In the German two-tier system, outpatient reimbursement rates for both public and private insurance are centrally determined but are more than twice as high for the...

We study theoretically and empirically how consumers in an individual private longterm health insurance market with front-loaded contracts respond to newly mandated portability requirements of their old-age provisions. To foster competition, effective 2009, the German legislature made the...

Evidence suggests that hospital mergers can reduce costs but less is known about their effects on patient outcomes. We study how a wave of mergers that led to the shutdown of one third of all Swedish maternity wards affected the health of mothers who gave birth and their newborns. Applying a...

We measure one aspect of how access to emergency care through ambulance services changes for patients when a hospital closes. We empirically estimate the time needed to transport a patient to an emergency department in an ambulance in the period immediately after the hospital closes. We find...

We investigate the spillover effects of early-life medical treatments on the siblings of treated children. We use a regression discontinuity design that exploits changes in medical treatments across the very low birth weight (VLBW) cutoff. Using administrative data from Denmark, we first confirm...

We exploit time variation across Italian Regions in the implementation of a prospective pay systems (PPS) for hospitals based on Diagnosis Related Groups (DRGs) to assess their impact on self-assessed health status and on the use of health care services. We consider a survey of more than 600,000...