In the home-care services industry, caregivers drive to visit patients scattered in a district and deliver various care services at the patient's home. We use a unique data set, with a standard panel structure, recording the hours of service and the exact number of miles traveled by each...

This chapter summarizes the many aspects of public policy for health care. I first consider government policy affecting individual behaviors. Government intervention to change individual actions such as smoking and drinking is frequently justified on externality grounds. External costs of...

The 1990's have seen an explosion of state legislation mandating the provision of specific health insurance benefits, and the federal government appears poised to enact significant managed care patient protection legislation as well. Although patient protection is popular with voters, economists...

Classical analysis of health insurance markets often focuses on adverse selection, which creates a direct externality between the enrollees of the same health plan: under an imperfect risk adjustment, the higher the risks of my co-enrollees, the higher my cost of insurance. This has lead to the...

We provide a modeling framework to think about selective contracting in the health care sector. Two health care providers differ in quality and costs. When buying health insurance, consumers observe neither provider quality nor costs. We derive an equilibrium where health insurers signal...

We provide a modeling framework to think about selective contracting in the health care sector. Two health care providers differ in quality and costs. When buying health insurance, consumers observe neither provider quality nor costs. We derive an equilibrium where health insurers signal...

This paper examines the features of HMOs and their associated ethical problems. And it points to a framework of needed consumer protection. The problems seem to flow from the very design of HMO medicine. One is prepayment. Every revenue dollar is also potentially a profit dollar when not spent...

U.S. Prison health care has recently been in the news and in the courts. A particular issue is whether prisons should contract out for health care. Contracting out has been growing over the past few decadest. The stated motivation for this change ranges from a desire to improve the prison health...

We study how firms target and influence expert intermediaries. In our empirical context, pharmaceutical manufacturers provide payments to physicians during promo- tional interactions. We develop an identification strategy based on plausibly exogenous variation in payments driven by differential...

A version of the Becker-Lancaster characteristics model featuring quality-quantity trade offs reveals a number of surprising market behaviors that can result from price regulations that are imposed on competitive markets for products that have adjustable non-price attributes. Quality need not...