Proposed "delinking" legislation would prohibit Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) from being remunerated based on the rebates and discounts they negotiate for drug insurance plans serving Medicare beneficiaries. This policy would significantly change drug pricing and utilization and shift...

Prices are regulated in many markets, ranging from healthcare to labor to telecommunications. This paper reinterprets the variables in the basic supply-demand model so that both product-definition and quantity are equilibrium outcomes. Specifically, compliance with price controls is achieved by...

This paper revisits Peltzman (1973) in light of two recent opportunities to quantitatively assess tradeoffs in drug regulation. First, reduced regulatory barriers to drug manufacturing associated with the 2017 reauthorization of Generic Drug User Fee Amendments were followed by significantly...

Marginal prices fell, and disposable incomes increased, for drug and alcohol consumers during the pandemic. Most of the amount, timing, and composition of the 240,000 deaths involving alcohol and drugs since early 2020 can be explained by income effects and category-specific price changes. For...

Based on published estimates of its price elasticity of demand and of tax wedges, as well as the method of revealed preference, I estimate that the annual social value of ESI is about $1.5 trillion beyond what policyholders, their employers, and taxpayers pay for it. The private component of...

The health costs of in-person schooling during the pandemic, if any, fall primarily on the families of students, largely due to the fact that students significantly outnumber teachers. Data from North Carolina, Wisconsin, Australia, England, and Israel covering almost 80 million person-days in...

Were workers more likely to be infected by COVID-19 in their workplace, or outside it? While both economic models of the pandemic and public health policy recommendations often presume that the workplace is less safe, this paper seeks an answer both in micro data and economic theory. The...

This paper provides the first quantitative economic models of pharmacy benefit management regulation. The price-theoretic models allow for various market frictions and imperfections including market power, coordination costs, tax distortions, and incomplete innovation incentives. A rigorous...

The extent of voluntary cooperation in the presence of externalities is shown as an equilibrium outcome in the supply and demand framework. The analysis uses familiar ingredients to provide a new way of understanding the results of the extensive literature beginning with Buchanan, Coase, Ostrom,...

The human capital investment model with endogenous labor supply is generalized to consumer and health behaviors while retaining the tractability of comparative-static analysis of a single first-order condition. Accounting for the endogenous specialization responses is essential to properly...