There are two broad classes of models used to address the econometric problems caused by skewness in data commonly encountered in health care applications: (1) transformation to deal with skewness (e.g., OLS on ln(y)); and (2) alternative weighting approaches based on exponential conditional...

Under the assumption of no unmeasured confounders, a large literature exists on methods that can be used to estimating average treatment effects (ATE) from observational data and that spans regression models, propensity score adjustments using stratification, weighting or regression and even the...

End-stage renal disease (ESRD), or kidney failure, is a debilitating, costly, and increasingly common medical condition. Little is known about how different financing approaches affect ESRD outcomes and delivery of care. This paper presents results from a comparative review of 12 countries with...

The world-wide and ongoing rise in obesity has generated enormous popular interest and policy concern in developing countries, where it is rapidly becoming the major public health problem facing such nations. As a consequence, there has been a rapidly growing field of economic analysis of the...

Selective contracting is an increasingly popular tool for reducing health care costs, but these savings must be weighed against consumer surplus losses from restricted access. In both public and private prescription drug insurance plans, issuers utilize preferred pharmacy networks to reduce drug...

The ACA requires insurers to provide cost-sharing reductions (CSRs) to low-income consumers on the marketplaces. We link 2013-2015 All-Payer Claims Data to 2004-2013 administrative hospital discharge data from Utah and exploit policy-driven differences in the value of CSRs that are solely...

Improvements in medical treatment have contributed to rising health spending. Yet there is relatively little evidence on whether the spending increase is “worth it” in the sense of producing better health outcomes of commensurate value—a critical question for understanding productivity in...

We study how physicians respond to financial incentives imposed by episode-based bundled payment (EBP), which encourages lower spending and improved quality for an entire episode of care. Specifically, we study the impact of the Arkansas Health Care Payment Improvement Initiative, a multi-payer...

This paper is the first to use the method of instrumental variables to estimate the causal impact of youth obesity on U.S. medical care costs. We examine data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey for 2001-2013 and instrument for child BMI using the BMI of the child's biological mother. IV...

This paper uses a difference-in-difference framework to estimate the effects of mobile money transfer technology (MMT) on healthcare usage in the face of negative health shocks. We use survey data from 2013-16 with quarterly observations on about 1,600 households of 10 villages in the Kisumu...