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...

A central controversy in the debate about Medicare is whether the program spends too much money or whether instead it should be expanded to cover more. I consider the value of increased Medicare spending. I argue that on average Medicare spending is worth it: the health gains brought by medicare...

We use data on health plan choices by employees of Harvard University to compare the benefits of insurance competition with the costs of adverse selection. Moving to a voucher-type system induced significant adverse selection, with a welfare loss of 2 to 4 percent of baseline spending. But...