Medicaid was primarily designed to protect and insure the poor against medical shocks. Yet, poorer people tend to live shorter lifespans and incur lower medical expenses before death than richer people. Taking these and other important dimensions of heterogeneity into account, and carefully...

Economic disruptions generally create winners and losers. The compensation problem consists of designing a reform of the existing income tax system that offsets the welfare losses of the latter by redistributing the gains of the former. We derive a formula for the compensating tax reform and its...

"Why is inflation persistently high in some periods and low in others? The reason may be absence of commitment in monetary policy. In a standard model, absence of commitment leads to multiple equilibria, or expectation traps, even without trigger strategies. In these traps, expectations of high...

We develop methods to solve general equilibrium models in which forward-looking agents are subject to waves of pessimism, optimism, and uncertainty that turn out to critically affect macroeconomic outcomes. Agents in the model are fully rational, conduct Bayesian learning, and they know that...

We examine the effect of the Medicaid expansions under the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) on consumer, financial outcomes using data from a major credit reporting agency for a large, national sample of adults. We employ the synthetic control method to compare individuals...

I investigate the relationship between physician pay, C-section use, and infant health, using vital statistics data and newly collected data on Medicaid payments to physicians. First, I confirm past results - when Medicaid pays doctors relatively more for C-sections, they perform them more...

The difficulties that Medicaid beneficiaries face accessing medical care are often attributed to the program's low reimbursement rates relative to other payers. There is little evidence, however, as to the actual effects of Medicaid doctor payment rates on access and health outcomes for...

Use of public assistance by noncitizens is controversial. Before 2018, institutionalization and receipt of cash benefits were considered as evidence of whether immigrants were likely to become a "public charge" and, therefore, ineligible for citizenship. But a new rule-proposed in 2018 and...

We study the effect of the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion on coverage dynamics following the sudden loss of coverage from an employer plan. This analysis leverages novel administrative data capturing monthly health insurance coverage for the U.S. population. Using these data, we...