Should the national government undertake policies aimed at strengthening the economies of particular localities or regions? Agglomeration economies and human capital spillovers suggest that such policies could enhance welfare. However, the mere existence of agglomeration externalities does not...

One explanation for insufficient use of primary care in the U.S. is a lack of trust between patients and providers - particularly along racial lines. We assess the role of racial concordance between patients and medical providers in driving use of preventive care and the implications for patient...

There are widespread differences in total factor productivity across producers in the U.S. and around the world. To help explain these variations, we devise a general test for misallocation in input choices - the underuse of effective inputs and overuse of ineffective ones. Misallocation implies...

The population of the United States, as with the rest of the world, is aging rapidly, with the most rapid growth occurring among the age 85 and older population, those who rely most on long-term care. In this chapter, we review the delivery and financing of long-term care in the U.S. We show...

Hospitals play a key role in patient outcomes and spending, but efforts to improve their quality are hindered because we do not know whether hospital quality indicators are causal or biased. We evaluate the validity of commonly used quality indicators, such as mortality, readmissions, inpatient...

We use the design of Medicare's prescription drug benefit program to demonstrate three facts about the health consequences of cost-sharing. First, we show that an as-if-random increase of 33.6% in out-of-pocket price (11.0 percentage points (p.p.) change in coinsurance, or $10.40 per drug)...

Do urban children live more segregated lives than urban adults? Using cellphone location data and following the 'experienced isolation' methodology of Athey et al. (2021), we compare the isolation of students over the age of 16--who we identify based on their time spent at a high school--and...

Designing benefits for the growing platform workforce in the U.S. poses significant challenges. While platform workers need protection against unforeseen shocks, work that is often part time and spread across multiple platforms makes the traditional benefits model untenable. This paper reports...

We analyze whether receiving care from higher-priced hospitals leads to lower mortality. We overcome selection issues by using an instrumental variable approach which exploits that ambulance companies are quasi-randomly assigned to transport patients and have strong preferences for certain...

We empirically assess the potential financial impact of future gene therapies on the US economy. After identifying 109 late-stage gene therapy clinical trials currently underway, we estimate the number of new and existing patients with corresponding diseases to be treated by these gene...