This paper develops new econometric methods to infer hospital quality in a model with discrete dependent variables and non-random selection. Mortality rates in patient discharge records are widely used to infer hospital quality. However, hospital admission is not random and some hospitals may...

We seek to investigate whether managed health care can affect mortality, and if so, through which mechanisms. We estimate the impact of Medicare+Choice (M+C), Medicare's managed care program, on elderly mortality, using a county-level panel from 1993 to 2000. We control for endogenous M+C...

This paper reviews the literature devoted to studying markets for health care services and health insurance. There has been tremendous growth and progress in this field. A tremendous amount of new research has been done in this area over the last 10 years. In addition, there has been increasing...

This paper studies the effects of nursing home unionization on numerous labor, establishment, and consumer outcomes using a regression discontinuity design. We find negative effects of unionization on staffing levels and no decline in care quality, suggesting positive labor productivity effects....

The US health care sector is, by most accounts, extraordinarily inefficient. Health information technology (IT) has been championed as a tool that can transform health care delivery. Recently, the federal government has taken an active role in promoting health IT diffusion. There is little...

The concept of a Nash equilibrium in Nash bargains, proposed in Horn and Wolinsky (1988), has become the workhorse bargaining model for predicting and estimating the division of surplus in applied analysis of bilateral oligopoly. This paper proposes a non-cooperative foundation for this...

Coal mining is a dangerous occupation where safety is an important output. Fatalities and disasters may change future accident costs at or near a mine. We use this variation to understand the tradeoffs between mineral output and safety. We find that government inspections and penalties increase...

Standard Medicare Part D drug insurance provides limited coverage in a ``donut hole'' region, making the purchase problem dynamic. We develop a discontinuity-based test for myopia using enrollees who arrived near the coverage gap early in the year. We find that there are fewer and cheaper...

We seek to determine the causes and magnitudes of network externalities for the automated clearinghouse (ACH) electronic payments system. We construct an equilibrium model of customer and bank adoption of ACH. We structurally estimate the parameters of the model using an indirect inference...

Will an industry with no antitrust policy converge to monopoly, competition, or somewhere in between? We analyze this question using a dynamic dominant firm model with rational agents, endogenous mergers, and constant returns to scale production. We find that perfect competition and monopoly are...