The COVID-19 pandemic has forced federal, state and local policymakers to respond by legislating, enacting, and enforcing social distancing policies. However, the impact of these policies on healthcare utilization in the United States has been largely unexplored. We examine the impact of...

Childhood vaccinations are an important input to disease prevention, but vaccination rates have declined over the last decade due largely to parental fears about vaccine dangers. Education campaigns on the safety of vaccines seem to have little impact. Anecdotal evidence on disease outbreaks...

The CDC reports that 1.13 million Americans have died of COVID-19 through June of 2023. I use a model of the impact over the past three years of vaccines and private and public behavior to mitigate disease transmission during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States to address two questions....

We study the impact of non-pharmaceutical policy interventions (NPIs) like “stay-at-home” orders on the spread of infectious disease. Local policies have little impact on the economy nor on local public health. Stay-at-home is only weakly associated with slower growth of Covid-19 cases....

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 trade-off between the length of treatment days and the units of service provided per day for elderly patients in the context of the initiative taken by the Ministry of Health and Welfare of Japan to discourage lengthy hospital treatment and/or stay by elderly patients. By...

Adverse behavioral risk factors contribute to a large share of deaths. We examine the effects on life expectancy (LE) and quality-adjusted life expectancy (QALE) of changes in six major behavioral risk factors over the 1960-2010 period: smoking, obesity, heavy alcohol use, and unsafe use of...

We use comprehensive patient-level discharge data to study the effect of Medicaid on the use of hospital services. Our analysis relies on cross-state variation in the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion, along with within-state variation across ZIP Codes in exposure to the expansion. We...