Inefficiency in the U.S. health care system has often been characterized as quot;flat of the curvequot; spending providing little or no incremental value. In this paper, we draw on macroeconomic models of diffusion and productivity to better explain the empirical patterns of outcome improvements...

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...

Mergers that affiliate a hospital with a Catholic owner, network, or system reduce the set of possible reproductive medical procedures since Catholic hospitals have strict prohibitions on contraception. Using changes in ownership of hospitals, we find that Catholic hospitals reduce the per bed...

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...

The conventional wisdom in health economics is that large differences in average productivity across hospitals are the result of idiosyncratic, institutional features of the healthcare sector which dull the role of market forces. Strikingly, however, we find that productivity dispersion in heart...

We use simple economic insights to develop a framework for distinguishing between prejudice and statistical discrimination using observational data. We focus our inquiry on the enormous literature in healthcare where treatment disparities by race and gender are not explained by access,...

Obtaining better information on the quality of health care providers is one of the most pressing issues in health policy today. In this paper we (1) develop a new method for measuring quality of care that overcomes the key limitations of available quality measures, and (2) apply this method to...

We develop a simple framework to measure the role of hospital allocation in racial disparities in health care and use it to study Black and white Medicare patients who are treated for heart attacks – a condition where virtually everyone receives care, hospital care is highly effective, and...

The impacts of choice in public services are controversial. We exploit a reform in the English National Health Service to assess the impact of relaxing constraints on patient choice. We estimate a demand model to evaluate whether increased choice increased demand elasticity faced by hospitals...

Evidence of regional variation in health care utilization has been well-documented over the past 40 years. Yet uncertainty persists about whether this variation is primarily the result of supply-side or demand-side forces, and the difference matters for both theory and policy. In this article,...