Pharmaceutical firms currently spend over $4 billion on direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) of prescription drugs, a nearly 30-fold increase since 1993 that has led to much debate about its value to patients. We examine how DTCA influences drug utilization along the extensive and intensive...

This paper focuses on the practical importance of a critical but under-explored interpretation of a provision in the Affordable Care Act (ACA): whether "affordable" refers to the cost of single coverage alone, or to family or single coverage as applicable to the worker, in determining the...

We examine the effect of New York City's universal pre-kindergarten program (UPK) on the health and utilization of children enrolled in Medicaid using a difference-in-regression- discontinuities design. We find that UPK increases the probability that a child is diagnosed with asthma or with...

Under asymmetric information about sexual history, sexual activity creates externalities. Abstinence by those with few partners perversely increases the average probability of HIV infection in the pool of available partners. Since this increases prevalence among the high activity people who...

Undocumented immigrants are ineligible for public insurance coverage for prenatal care in most states, despite their children representing a large fraction of births and having U.S. citizenship. In this paper, we examine a policy that expanded Medicaid pregnancy coverage to undocumented...

We estimate whether federal aid for state and local governments played a role in advancing population testing for COVID-19 and the administration of vaccines. To overcome biases that can result from the endogeneity of federal aid allocations, we use an instrumental-variables estimator reliant on...

A rich economic literature has examined the human capital impacts of disease-eliminating health interventions, such as the rollout of new vaccines. This literature is based on reduced-form approaches which exploit proxies for disease burden, such as mortality, instead of actual infection counts,...