There are many technology platforms that bring benefits only when users share data. In healthcare, this is a key policy issue, because of the potential cost savings and quality improvements from ‘big data’ in the form of sharing electronic patient data across medical providers. Indeed, one...

Conflicting trends confound the pharmaceutical industry. The productivity of pharmaceutical innovation has declined in recent years. At the same time, the cohort of large companies who are the leading engines of pharmaceutical R&D has become increasingly concentrated. The concurrent presence of...

The HIV epidemic has dramatically decreased labor supply among prime-age adults in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using within-country variation in regional HIV prevalence and a synthetic panel, I find that HIV significantly increases the capital–labor ratio in urban manufacturing firms. The impact of...

Whereas a large literature has shown the importance of early life health for adult socioeconomic outcomes, there is little evidence on the importance of adolescent health. We contribute to the literature by studying the impact of adolescent health status on adult labor market outcomes using a...

Managed Care (MC) is expected to provide health care at a lower cost than conventional provision. Therefore, Switzerland intends to promote MC by forcing health insurers to write MC contracts and introducing budgetary co-responsibility for ambulatory care physicians. A discrete choice experiment...

Disabled individuals under 65 years old account for 15% of Medicaid recipients but half of all Medicaid spending. Despite their large cost, few studies have investigated the effects of Medicaid expansions for disabled individuals on insurance coverage and crowd-out of private insurance. Using an...

Prior studies suggest that hospital care is countercyclical among Medicare beneficiaries, and if anything, procyclical among the non-elderly. In this paper, we provide the first physician-level analysis of changes in healthcare provision to Medicare and privately insured patients across the...

We show, with three longitudinal datasets, that cigarette taxes and prices affect smoking initiation decisions. Evidence from longitudinal studies is mixed but generally find that initiation does not vary with price or tax. We show that the lack of statistical significance partly results because...

We examine whether exposure to direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) for antidepressant drugs affects individual use of these medications among those suffering from depression. Prior studies have almost exclusively relied on making connections between national or market-level advertising...

Explanations of growth in health expenditures have restricted attention to the mean. We explain change throughout the distribution of expenditures, providing insight into how expenditure growth and its explanation differ along the distribution. We analyse Dutch data on actual health expenditures...