When markets fail to provide socially optimal outcomes, governments often intervene through 'managed competition' where firms compete for per-consumer subsidies. Subsidies are generally set across geographies according to estimates of the cost of government provision, a method which may not be...

Rising list prices are often used to illustrate the burden of prescription drug spending, but payers routinely negotiate rebates from manufacturers that generate differences between list and net prices. List prices are easily available and affect patient cost-sharing, but net prices are...

This paper investigates the impact of Medicare HMO penetration on the medical care expenditures incurred by Medicare fee-for-service enrollees. We find that increasing penetration leads to reduced health care spending on fee-for-service beneficiaries. In particular, a one percentage point...

We seek to understand the relationship between employer decisions regarding which health plans firms choose to offer to their employees and the performance of those plans. We measure performance using data from the Health Plan Employer Data Information Set (HEDIS) and the Consumer Assessment of...

In this paper we estimate the returns associated with the provision of coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery, by payer type (Medicare, HMO, etc.). Because reliable measures of prices and treatment costs are often unobserved, we seek to infer returns from hospital entry behavior. We...

We estimate a Bayesian learning model in order to assess the value of health plan performance information and the extent to which the explicit provision of information about product quality alters consumer behavior. We take advantage of a natural experiment in which health plan performance...

We study how individuals with private health insurance choose providers for lower-limb MRI scans. Lower-limb MRI scans are a fairly undifferentiated service and providers' prices routinely vary by a factor of five or more across providers within hospital referral regions. We observe that despite...

We systematically review the literature linking health to economic activity, particularly education and labor market outcomes, over the lifecycle. In the first part, we review studies that link childhood health to later-life outcomes. The main themes we focus on are in-utero exposures,...

We study how physicians respond to financial incentives imposed by episode-based bundled payment (EBP), which encourages lower spending and improved quality for an entire episode of care. Specifically, we study the impact of the Arkansas Health Care Payment Improvement Initiative, a multi-payer...

Understanding how healthy lifespans are changing is essential for public policy. This paper explores changes in healthy lifespan in the U.S. over time and considers reasons for the changes. We reach three fundamental conclusions. First, we show that healthy life increased measurably in the US...