Occupational licensing is among the fastest-growing labor market institutions in the U.S. economy. One of the key features of occupational licensing is that the law determines who gets to do the work. In those cases where universally licensed occupations are both complements to and substitutes...

This paper investigates the rise in shortages of sterile injectable pharmaceutical drugs in the US. I examine a policy change in 2005 that differentially reduced Medicare Part B payments for pharmaceuticals. Drugs whose payments dropped more due to the policy change have had greater increases in...

On January 1, 2006, the federal government began providing insurance coverage for Medicare recipients' prescription drug expenditures through a new program known as Medicare Part D. Rather than setting pharmaceutical prices itself, the government contracted with private insurance plans to...

Motivated by widely publicized concerns that there are "too many" plans, we structurally estimate (and validate) an equilibrium model of the Medicare Part D market to study the welfare impacts of two feasible, similar-sized approaches for reducing choice. One reduces the maximum number of firm...

I use the Medicare Part D prescription drug insurance market to examine the dynamics of firm interaction with consumers on an insurance exchange. Enrollment data show that consumers face switching frictions leading to inertia in plan choice, and a regression discontinuity design indicates...

Public financing of private health insurance may generate external effects beyond the subsidized population, by influencing the size and bargaining power of health insurers. We test for this external effect in the context of Medicare Part D. We analyze how Part D-related insurer size increases...

We examine the relationship between quality'' and market outcomes for a group of drugs used to treat rheumatoid arthritis. Though this is a widespread and debilitating disease with very substantial impacts on the health of patients and on the economy, currently available drugs have limited...

We estimate the economic surplus created by Medicare Advantage under its reformed competitive bidding rules. We use data on the universe of Medicare beneficiaries, and develop a model of plan bidding that accounts for both market power and risk selection. We find that private plans have costs...

This paper examines optimal regulatory testing requirements when new product quality is uncertain but market participants may learn over time. We develop a model capturing the regulator's tradeoff between consumer risk exposure and access to innovation. Using new data and exogenous variation...

In this article, we show that a small innovation in inspection technology can make substantial differences in inspection outcomes. For restaurant hygiene inspections, the state of Florida has introduced a handheld electronic device, the portable digital assistant (PDA), which reminds inspectors...