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,...

Greater patient cost-sharing could help reduce the fiscal pressures associated with insurance expansion by reducing the scope for moral hazard. But it is possible that low-income recipients are unable to cut back on utilization wisely and that, as a result, higher cost-sharing will lead to worse...

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...

In medicine, the reasons for variation in treatment rates across hospitals serving similar patients are not well understood. Some interpret this variation as unwarranted, and push standardization of care as a way of reducing allocative inefficiency. An alternative interpretation is that...

Precision medicines – therapies that rely on the use of genetic, epigenetic, and protein biomarkers – create a better match between patients with specific disease subtypes and medications that are more effective for those patients. This heterogeneity in response has implications for the...

Patient cost-sharing for primary care and prescription drugs is designed to reduce the prevalence of moral hazard in medical utilization. Yet the success of this strategy depends on two factors: the elasticity of demand for those medical goods, and the risk of downstream hospitalizations by...

We estimate consumers%u2019 valuation of disability insurance using a stochastic lifecycle framework inwhich disability is modeled as permanent, involuntary retirement. We base our probabilities of worklimiting disability on 25 years of data from the Current Population Survey and examine the...

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) affects one in ten people aged 65 or older and is the most expensive disease in the United States. We describe the central economic questions raised by AD. While there is overlap with the economics of aging, the defining features of the ‘economics of Alzheimer's...

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...

Productivity spillovers are often cited as a reason for geographic specialization in production. A large literature in medicine documents specialization across areas in the use of surgical treatments, which is unrelated to patient outcomes. We show that a simple Roy model of patient treatment...