We examine how a key provision of the Affordable Care Act – the expansion of Medicaid eligibility – affected health insurance coverage, access to care, and labor market transitions of unemployed workers. Comparing trends in states that implemented the Medicaid expansion to those that did...

The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services has introduced several pay-for-performance programs in the last few years to encourage hospitals to improve quality of care and reduce costs. Some state Medicaid programs have also introduced pay-for-performance for nursing homes. Long-term care...

With periodic recessions and the rising costs of health care, it is important to know how labor market participation and insecurity affects health outcomes. Yet, this line of research faces a number of methodological challenges which this paper aims to address. We turn to Ukraine's experience...

Background: Physician-induced demand (PID) is an important theory to test given the longstanding controversy surrounding it. Empirical health economists have been challenged to find natural experiments to test the theory because PID is tantamount to strong income effects. The data requirements...

We consider the effects of student ability, college quality, and the interaction between the two on academic outcomes and future earnings. Both ability and college quality strongly improve outcomes and earnings. We find little evidence to support the "mismatch" hypothesis that college quality...

We provide simple tests for selection on unobserved variables in the Vytlacil-Imbens-Angrist framework for Local Average Treatment Effects. The tests allow researchers not only to test for selection on either or both of the treated and untreated outcomes, but also to assess the magnitude of the...

We study the job training provided under the US Workforce Investment Act (WIA) to adults and dislocated workers in two states. Our substantive contributions center on impacts estimated non-experimentally using administrative data. These impacts compare WIA participants who do and do not receive...

We estimate the effects of the vocational rehabilitation (VR) program run by the Canada Pension Plan Disability Program using administrative data. Identification relies on "selection on observed variables" plus careful comparison group selection and institutional knowledge regarding sources of...

We consider the effects of student ability, college quality, and the interaction between the two on academic outcomes and future earnings. Both ability and college quality strongly improve outcomes and earnings. We find little evidence to support the "mismatch" hypothesis that college quality...

Non-experimental evaluations of programs compare individuals who choose to participate in a program to individuals who do not. Such comparisons run the risk of conflating non-random selection into the program with its causal effects. By randomly assigning individuals to participate in the...