This study exploits over 5,000 variations in subsidy generosity across ages and municipalities in Japan to examine how children respond to healthcare prices. We find that free care significantly increases outpatient spending, with price elasticities considerably smaller than for adults. Price...

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...

It is often argued that tax competition may lead to a "race to the bottom". Such a race may hold indeed in the case of the pure case of factor mobility (such as capital mobility). However, in this paper we emphasize the unique feature of labor migration, that may nullify the "race to the bottom"...

Only large mergers must be reported to the US government, so many anticompetitive deals may effectively avoid antitrust scrutiny. This paper uses data from the dialysis industry to show that premerger notifications are essential to antitrust enforcement and that ensuing enforcement actions...

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...

Unlike in the production of most goods, changes in capacity for labor-intensive services only affect outcomes of interest insofar as service providers change the way they allocate their time in response to those capacity changes. In this paper, we examine how public sector service providers...

The adoption of new clinical practice patterns by medical care providers is often challenging, even when they are believed to be both efficacious and profitable. This paper uses a randomized field experiment to examine the effects of temporary financial incentives paid to medical care clinics...

In most US health insurance markets, plans face strong incentives to “upcode” the patient diagnoses they report to the regulator, as these affect the risk-adjusted payments plans receive. We show that enrollees in private Medicare plans generate 6% to 16% higher diagnosis-based risk scores...

Academic Medical Centers (AMCs)—comprising medical schools, teaching hospitals, and research laboratories—play an important role in US biomedical innovation. The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 changed reimbursements for Medicare inpatient claims and subsidies for medical residents. We compare...

The Affordable Care Act Marketplaces were introduced in 2014 as part of a reform of the U.S. individual health insurance market. While the individual market represents a small slice of the U.S. population, it has historically been the market segment with the lowest rates of take-up and greatest...