We investigate whether physicians’ financial incentives influence health care supply, technology diffusion, and resulting patient outcomes. In 1997, Medicare consolidated the geographic regions across which is adjusts physician payments, generating area-specific price shocks. Areas with higher...

I study the effect of health insurance expansions on medical innovation. Practitioner dominated innovation (Roberts, 1988) creates an important role for the incentives in “local” payment systems as drivers of medical technology development. I show that, over the 15 years following Medicare...

Because the health sector makes up a large share of the U.S. economy, widespread price changes for medical services can impact overall inflation significantly. Cuts to public health-care spending spill over directly and indirectly to private spending. A recent estimate suggests the full effect...

Community-rating regulations equalize the insurance premiums faced by the healthy and the unhealthy. Intended reductions in the unhealthy's premiums can be undone, however, if the healthy forgo coverage. The severity of this adverse selection problem hinges largely on how health care costs are...

We describe the broad range of uncertainties faced by the developers of medical technologies. Empirically, we estimate the asset market incidence of the realization  of two such of uncertainties experienced by the biotechnology firm Myriad Genetics, Inc.

We investigate whether physicians' financial incentives influence health care supply, technology diffusion, and resulting patient outcomes. In 1997, Medicare consolidated the geographic regions across which it adjusts physician payments, generating area-specific price shocks. Areas with higher...

I study the channels through which health insurance influences medical innovation. Following Medicare and Medicaid's passage, I find that U.S.-based medical-equipment patenting rose by 40 to 50 percent relative to both other U.S. patenting and foreign medical-equipment patenting. Within the...

Recent estimates suggest that in 2007, Afghan opiate production accounted for about 93 percent of the world's total. This article presents a framework for estimating the potential for source country drug control policies to reduce this production. It contains a first pass at estimating the...

In this paper we examine the economic implications of several policy options for capping the mortgage interest deduction (MID). We extend the standard user–cost model of owner–occupied housing to include a cap on the mortgage size receiving tax–favored status. Our user–cost estimates for...