When it comes to social institutions, not-for-profit organizations (NFPs) allegedly strike a balance between the private and public realm. While privately owned and operated, not-for-profits are distinguished by their ostensibly public purpose – in eschewing private profits, they claim to make...

FROM THE ARTICLE: At the end of November 2023, the New York Times published an editorial: Why Are Nonprofit Hospitals Focused More on Dollars Than Patients? It is certainly a valid question. Most people might assume that not-for-profit (NFP) organisations focus on providing a public benefit...

Using county-level data on COVID-19 mortality and infections, along with county-level information on the adoption of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) in the United States, we examine how the speed of NPI adoption affected COVID-19 mortality. Our estimates suggest that advancing the date...

Recent increases in mortality have brought life expectancy back to the forefront of the public health debate in the US. Though unprecedented, this trend comes after an equally striking phenomenon: a decades long deterioration in the relative position of the US in the world's life expectancy...

Increases in mental health diagnoses and suicidal behaviors in Emergency Departments are often cited as evidence of an accelerating child mental health crisis. We ask whether trends in ED visits provide an accurate picture of changes in U.S. child mental health. These measures have been...

We examine the causal effect of health insurance on mortality using the universe of low-income adults, a dataset of 37 million individuals identified by linking the 2010 Census to administrative tax data. Our methodology leverages state-level variation in the timing and adoption of Medicaid...

The growth of longevity in the U.S. and other countries has increased interest in raising the age of eligibility for public retirement benefits. The consequences of this policy depend on the health of the older adult population overall and by socioeconomic group. In this paper, we estimate how...

This paper develops and estimates a dynamic life-cycle model to quantify why households save and work. The model incorporates multiple sources of risk--health, marital status, wages, medical expenses, and mortality--as well as endogenous labor supply and human capital accumulation, retirement,...

Landmark results from the Women's Health Initiative trial showed that random assignment to menopausal hormone therapy (MHT) elevated risks of breast cancer and other adverse events. Recent analyses argue that MHT risks are small. These analyses report intention-to-treat (ITT) effects, ignoring...

One in seven Americans carry medical debt, with $88 billion reported on consumer credit reports. In April 2023, the three major credit bureaus stopped reporting medical debts below $500. We study the effects of this information deletion on consumer credit scores, credit limits and utilization,...