Few economic indicators have more salience and pervasive financial impact on everyday lives in the United States than poverty measures. Nevertheless, policymakers, researchers, advocates, and legislators generally do not understand the details of poverty measure mechanics. These detailed...

The theory of the second best implies that policymakers should address all relevant issues in a comprehensive manner to improve social welfare. Since most components in the economy are interconnected, a policy focusing narrowly on particular aspects of a broad issue often produces serious side...

How do patient and provider incentives affect the provision of long-term care? Our analysis of 551 thousand nursing home stays yields three main insights. First, Medicaid-covered residents prolong their stays instead of transitioning to community-based care due to limited cost-sharing. Second,...

A life care annuity is a bundled insurance product comprised of a life annuity and long-term care insurance. Some recent studies find the two risks - longevity risk and long-term care risk - to be opposing and thus life care annuities advantageous in regard to pooling the two risks. Based on...

This study analyzes the dynamic relationship between health status and expenditures on repeated multiple treatments, which are typical in long-term care. To facilitate causal inferences where complex dynamic interdependencies exist between many variables, we adopt a structural vector...

2014 marks the 10-year anniversary of the introduction of health savings accounts (HSAs), created by Congress in 2003. In 2013, enrollment in HSA-eligible health plans was estimated to range from 15.5 million to 20.4 million policyholders and their dependents. Nearly 11 million accounts holding...

This paper offers an integrated view of the relationships between health spending, medical innovation, health status, growth and welfare. Health spending triggers technological progress, which is a potential source of better outcomes in terms of longevity and quality of life, a direct source of...

Regarding the connection between economic development and public health, the statistically evident correlation between a country's gross domestic product and life expectancy is widely discussed. An important aspect that keeps resurfacing in discussions on why the relationship between the latter...

This paper examines the effects of health-oriented food tax reforms on the distribution of tax payments, food demand and health outcomes. Unlike earlier work, we also take into account the uncertainty related to both demand estimation and health estimates and report the confidence intervals for...

There are fundamental public health challenges and trade–offs that need to be confronted for the achievement of the highest attainable standard of health and the sustainability agendas to be compatible. The trade–offs arise because, at a population level, the highest attainable standard of...