The paper examines whether, among inpatient psychiatric admissions in California, for-profit (FP) hospitals engage in cream skimming, i.e., choosing patients for some characteristic(s) other than their need for care, which enhances the profitability of the provider. We propose a novel approach...

Worker shortages are common in many industries. This paper examines the effect of government subsidies to address these shortages in the context of a reform that tied Medicaid payments to nursing home staffing levels. We find that the reform substantially increased staffing, especially for...

E-cigarette licensure laws (ELLs) require retailers to obtain a state license to sell e-cigarettes over the counter. This study is the first to comprehensively explore the effect of ELL adoption on youth and adult tobacco product use. Using data from the State Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS)...

There has been a revival of warfare and threats of interstate war in recent years as the number of countries engaged in armed conflict surged dramatically, reaching to levels unprecedented since the end of Cold War. This is happening at a time when the global burden of mental health illness is...

Regulators of new products confront a tradeoff between speeding a new product to market and collecting additional product quality information. The FDA's Breakthrough Therapy Designation (BTD) provides an opportunity to understand if a regulator can use new policy to innovate around this...

There is much debate about the effects of pharmaceutical direct to consumer advertising (DTCA) on health care use. In this paper, we inform this debate by examining the effects of DTCA on office visits, as well as treatment courses resulting from those visits, for five common chronic conditions...

We study a fundamental reform of the public Disability Insurance (DI) system in Germany. Effective 2001, cohorts born after 1960 are no longer eligible for "occupational DI." Occupational DI (ODI) implies benefit eligibility when health shocks prevent employees from working in their previous...

The benefits and costs of resource extraction are currently being hotly debated in the case of unconventional natural gas development (commonly known as "fracking"). Colorado provides a unique research environment to study the health impacts of conventional and unconventional forms of oil and...

This paper examines the tradeoffs of monitoring for wasteful public spending. By penalizing unnecessary spending, monitoring improves the quality of public expenditure and incentivizes firms to invest in compliance technology. I study a large Medicare program that monitored for unnecessary...

We investigate the effects of radiation therapy on the mortality and economic outcomes of breast cancer patients. We implement a 2SLS strategy within a difference-in-difference framework exploiting variation in treatment stemming from a medical guideline change in Denmark. Using administrative...