There is considerable controversy about the causes of regional variations in health care expenditures. We use vignettes from patient and physician surveys linked to Medicare expenditures at the Hospital Referral Region to test whether patient demand-side factors or physician supply-side factors...

We seek to explain the differences in fertility rates across high-income countries by focusing on the interaction between the increasing status of women in the workforce and their status in the household, particularly with regards to child care and home production. We observe three distinct...

Following an acrimonious healthcare reform debate involving charges of "death panels," in 2010, Congress explicitly forbade the use of cost-effectiveness analysis in government programs of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In this context, comparative effectiveness research emerged...

Do saving incentives such as Individual Retirement Accounts stimulate new saving or merely reshuffle existing assets?

Objective:- To compare the performance of two new approaches to risk adjustment that are free of the influence of observational intensity with methods that depend on diagnoses listed in administrative databases. Setting:- Administrative data from the US Medicare program for services provided in...

There is growing concern over the rising share of the US economy devoted to health care spending. Fueled in part by demographic transitions, unchecked increases in entitlement spending will necessitate some combination of substantial tax increases, elimination of other public spending, or...

Do saving incentives such as Individual Retirement Accounts stimulate new saving or merely reshuffle existing assets?

The authors argue that there is more to be learned from recent research on the effectiveness of targeted saving incentives than the wide variation in empirical estimates suggests. They conclude that characterizations of 'all new saving' or 'no new saving' are extreme IRAs and 401(k) plans appear...

Male life expectancy at birth fell by over six years in Russia between 1989 and 1994. Many other countries of the former Soviet Union saw similar declines, and female life expectancy fell as well. Using cross-country and Russian household survey data, we assess six possible explanations for this...