This paper seeks to understand the impact of the Medicare Rural Hospital Flexibility (Flex) Program on hospital choice and consumer welfare for rural residents. The Flex Program created a new class of hospital, the Critical Access Hospital (CAH), which receives more generous Medicare...

We estimate a bargaining model of competition between hospitals and managed care organizations (MCOs) and use the estimates to evaluate the effects of hospital mergers. We find that MCO bargaining restrains hospital prices significantly. The model demonstrates the potential impact of coinsurance...

The concept of a Nash equilibrium in Nash bargains, proposed in Horn and Wolinsky (1988), has become the workhorse bargaining model for predicting and estimating the division of surplus in applied analysis of bilateral oligopoly. This paper proposes a non-cooperative foundation for this...

This paper seeks to understand the impact of the Medicare Rural Hospital Flexi- bility (Flex) Program on rural resident hospital choice and welfare. The Flex program created a new class of hospital, the Critical Access Hospital (CAH), which receives more generous reimbursement in return for...

Coal mining is a dangerous occupation where safety is an important output. Fatalities and disasters may change future accident costs at or near a mine. We use this variation to understand the tradeoffs between mineral output and safety. We find that government inspections and penalties increase...

Standard Medicare Part D drug insurance provides limited coverage in a ``donut hole'' region, making the purchase problem dynamic. We develop a discontinuity-based test for myopia using enrollees who arrived near the coverage gap early in the year. We find that there are fewer and cheaper...

This paper develops a framework to analyze the value of information in the context of health plan choice. We use a Bayesian learning model to estimate the impact and value of information using data from a large employer, which started distributing health plan ratings to its employees in 1997. We...

We seek to determine the causes and magnitudes of network externalities for the automated clearinghouse (ACH) electronic payments system. We construct an equilibrium model of customer and bank adoption of ACH. We structurally estimate the parameters of the model using an indirect inference...

We present a dynamic model of the hospital industry in which nonprofit and for-profit hospitals coexist and compete and are differentiated by their objective functions, investment technologies, and taxation rates. In our model, patients differ by income and type of insurance coverage, and choose...