The fraction of GDP devoted to health care in the United States is the highest in the world and rising rapidly. Recent economic studies have highlighted the growing value of health improvements, but less attention has been paid to the efficiency costs of tax-financed spending to pay for such...

Life expectancy in the United States fares poorly in international comparisons, primarily because of high mortality rates above age 50. Its low ranking is often blamed on a poor performance by the health care system rather than on behavioral or social factors. This paper presents evidence on the...

Beginning in the mid 1980s and extending through the early to mid 1990s, a substantial number of women and children gained eligibility for Medicaid through a series of income-based expansions. Using natality data from the National Center for Health Statistics, we estimate fertility responses to...

We propose a "common-agency" model for explaining inefficient contracting in the U.S. healthcare system. In our setting, common-agency problems arise when multiple payers seek to motivate a shared provider to invest in improved care coordination. Our approach differs from other common-agency...

The conventional wisdom in health economics is that idiosyncratic features of the healthcare sector leave little scope for market forces to allocate consumers to higher performance producers. However, we find robust evidence across a variety of conditions and performance measures that higher...

One of the most important debates among health economists in rich nations is whether advances in biotechnology will spare their health care systems from a financial crisis. We must consider that prevalence rates of chronic diseases declined during the twentieth century and that this rate of...

There is widespread agreement that the US healthcare system wastes as much as 5% of GDP, yet little consensus on what care is actually unproductive. This partly arises because of the endogeneity of patient choice of treatment location. This paper uses the effective random assignment of patients...

Chay, Guryan and Mazumder (2009) found substantial racial convergence in AFQT and NAEP scores across cohorts born in the 1960's and early 1970's that was concentrated among blacks in the South. We demonstrated a close tracking between variation in the test score convergence across states and...

Mortality rates in the US fell more rapidly during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries than any other period in American history. This decline coincided with an epidemiological transition and the disappearance of a mortality "penalty" associated with living in urban areas. There is little...

This paper examines the shift in childbirth from home to hospital that occurred in the United States in the early twentieth century. Using a panel of city-level data over the period 1927-1940, we examine the shift of childbirth from home to hospital and analyze the impact of medical care on...