In February 2009 the U.S. Congress unexpectedly passed the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH). HITECH provides up to $27 billion to promote adoption and appropriate use of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) by hospitals. We measure the extent to which...

The use of government-mandated report cards to diminish uncertainty about the quality of products and services is widespread. However, report cards will have little effect if they simply confirm consumers' prior beliefs. Moreover, documented "responses" to report cards may reflect learning about...

This essay reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on quality disclosure and certification. After comparing quality disclosure with other quality assurance mechanisms and describing a brief history of quality disclosure, we address three key theoretical issues: (i) Why don't sellers...

Health care report cards - public disclosure of patient health outcomes at the level of the individual physician and/or hospital - may address important informational asymmetries in markets for health care, but they may also give doctors and hospitals incentives to decline to treat more...

Elzinga/Hogarty inflow/outflow analysis is a mainstay of geographic market definition in antitrust analysis. For example, U.S. antitrust agencies lost several hospital merger challenges when evidence showed that a nontrivial fraction of local patients traveled outside the local community for...

This paper investigates whether managers who fail to exploit regulatory loopholes are vulnerable to replacement. We use the U.S. hospital industry in 1985-1996 as a case study. A 1988 change in Medicare rules widened a pre-existing loophole in the Medicare payment system, presenting hospitals...

The theory of cost-shifting posits that nonprofit hospitals respond to negative financial shocks by raising prices for privately insured patients. We examine how hospitals responded to the sharp reductions in their endowments caused by the 2008 stock market collapse. We find that the average...

Prior research has shown that exogenous shocks to the demand for medical products spur additional product development. These studies do not distinguish between breakthrough products and those that largely duplicate the performance of existing products. In this paper, we use a novel data set to...

We examine the relationship between the adoption of EMR and hospital operating costs. We first identify a puzzle that has been seen in prior studies: Adoption of EMR is associated with a slight cost increase. We draw on the literature on IT and productivity to demonstrate that the average effect...

In the early 1990s Israel experienced a large and concentrated surge of immigration from the former Soviet Union. Most Russian immigrants had high education levels relative to the average Israeli. Despite the size and skill mix of the immigration shock, existing research has found little...