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...

We estimate the impacts of the introduction of National Health Insurance (NHI) in Taiwan in March 1995 on the health of infants. Prior to NHI, government workers (the control group) possessed health insurance policies with comprehensive coverage for births and infant medical care services....

This paper models how the evolving field of pharmacogenomics (PG), which is the science of using genomic markers to predict drug response, may impact drug development times, attrition rates, costs, and the future returns to research and development (R&D). While there still remains an abundance...

The U.S. health system has been described as the most competitive, heterogeneous, inefficient, fragmented, and advanced system of care in the world. In this paper, we consider two questions: First, is the U.S. health care system productively efficient relative to other wealthy countries, in the...

If profit maximization is the objective of a firm, new information about quality should affect firm behavior only through its effects on market demand. I consider an alternate model in which suppliers are motivated by a desire to perform well in addition to profit. The introduction of quality...

There is an extensive literature on the extent to which public health insurance coverage through Medicaid induces less private health insurance coverage. However, little is known about the effect of other components of the health care safety net in crowding out private coverage. We examine the...

Despite recent international efforts to increase antiretroviral treatment (ART) coverage, it is estimated that more than 5 million people who need ART in developing countries do not receive such treatment. Shortages of human resources to treat HIV/AIDS (HRHA) are one of the main constraints to...

Unlike the widespread adoption of information and communications technology (ICT) in much of the economy, adoption of ICT in clinical care is limited. We examine how a number of not previously emphasized features of the health care and ICT markets interact and exacerbate each other to create...

Prior studies suggest that, with elastically supplied inputs, free entry may lead to an inefficiently high number of firms in equilibrium. Under input scarcity, however, the welfare loss from free entry is reduced. Further, free entry may increase use of high-quality inputs, as oligopolistic...

Adaptation is the only strategy that is guaranteed to be part of the world's climate strategy. Using the most comprehensive set of data files ever compiled on mortality and its determinants over the course of the 20th century, this paper makes two primary discoveries. First, we find that the...