This paper examines the efficiency and equity implications of alternative health care system financing strategies. Using data across the OECD, I find that almost all financing choices are compatible with efficiency in the delivery of health care, and that there has been no consistent and...

This paper develops and implements a statistical methodology to account for the equilibrium effects (aka adverse selection) in design of risk adjustment formula in health insurance markets. Our setting is modeled on the situation in Medicare and the new state Exchanges where individuals sort...

The Affordable Care Act introduces or expands taxes on incomes and full-time employment, beginning in 2014. The purpose of this paper is to characterize the new full-time employment taxes from the perspective of a household budget constraint, measure their magnitude, and assess their likely...

The conventional method for developing health care plan payment systems uses existing data to study alternative algorithms with the purpose of creating incentives for an efficient and fair health care system. In this paper, we take a different approach and modify the input data rather than the...

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...

This article describes the anatomy of health insurance. It begins by considering the optimal design of health insurance policies. Such policies must make tradeoffs appropriately between risk sharing on the one hand and agency problems such as moral hazard (the incentive of people to seek more...

This paper is concerned with the economics of mental health. We argue that mental health economics is like health economics only more so: uncertainty and variation in treatments are greater; the assumption of patient self-interested behavior is more dubious; response to financial incentives such...

The main goal of this paper is to put forward a methodology for the measurement of product innovations using a value metric, i.e., equating the "magnitude" of innovations with the welfare gains that they generate. This research design is applied to the case of Computed Tomography (CT) Scanners,...