We seek to understand the relationship between employer decisions regarding which health plans firms choose to offer to their employees and the performance of those plans. We measure performance using data from the Health Plan Employer Data Information Set (HEDIS) and the Consumer Assessment of...

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...

Underground coal mining is a dangerous industry where the regulatory state may impose tradeoffs between productivity and safety. We recover the marginal tradeoffs using disasters near a mine as shocks that increase future accident costs. We find that in the second year after a disaster,...

The standard Medicare Part D drug insurance contract is nonlinear--with reduced subsidies in a coverage gap--resulting in a dynamic purchase problem. We consider enrollees who arrived near the gap early in the year and show that they should expect to enter the gap with high probability, implying...

There is limited evidence of behavioral changes resulting from electricity information feedback. Using a randomized control trial from a New York apartment building, we study long-term effects of information feedback from "Modlet" in-home devices, which provide near-real-time plug-level...

A "Nash equilibrium in Nash bargains" has become a workhorse bargaining model in applied analyses of bilateral oligopoly. This paper proposes a non-cooperative foundation for "Nash-in-Nash" bargaining that extends the Rubinstein (1982) alternating offers model to multiple upstream and downstream...

Will an industry with no antitrust policy converge to monopoly, competition or somewhere in between? We analyze this question using a dynamic dominant firm model with rational agents, endogenous mergers and constant returns to scale production. We find that perfect competition and monopoly are...

Will an industry with no antitrust policy converge to monopoly, competition, or somewhere in between? We analyze this question using a dynamic dominant firm model with rational agents, endogenous mergers, and constant returns to scale production. We find that perfect competition and monopoly are...