In this paper we investigate whether the presence of private insurance leads to improved health status. Using the Health and Retirement study we focus on adults in late middle age who are nearing entry into Medicare. Estimation addresses endogeneity of the insurance participation decision in...

This paper explores potential realization of gains by hospitals that are managed on a day-to-day basis by external organizations under formal contracts. It draws from the incentives literature, which postulates that managers of firms where ownership is separated from control will employ an input...

End-stage renal disease (ESRD), or kidney failure, is a debilitating, costly, and increasingly common medical condition. Little is known about how different financing approaches affect ESRD outcomes and delivery of care. This paper presents results from a comparative review of 12 countries with...

We estimate the impact of diabetic drug adherence on hospitalizations, ER visits, and hospital costs, using insurance claims from MarketScan® employer data. However, it is often difficult to measure the impact of drug adherence on hospitalizations since both adherence and hospitalizations may...

We use the 1997 Education Law in Turkey that increased compulsory formal schooling from five to eight years to study the effect of women's education on a range of outcomes relating to women's fertility, their children's health and measures of empowerment. We apply an instrumental variables...

The behavioral economic model presented in this paper argues that the effect of advertising and price differ by past consumption levels. The model predicts that advertising is more effective in reducing consumption at high past consumption levels but less effective at low past consumption...

In this paper, we examine the effect of food prices on clinical measures of obesity, including body mass index (BMI) and percentage body fat (PBF) measures derived from bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) and dual energy x-ray absorptiometry (DXA), among youths ages 12 through 18. The...

Large differences in fertility between women with high and low levels of education suggest that schooling may have a direct impact on knowledge and use of contraception. We investigate this issue using information on women in Mexico. In order to identify the causal effect of schooling, we...

Over the last several decades, numerous medical studies have compared the effectiveness of two common procedures for Coronary Artery Disease: Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (PCI) and Coronary Artery Bypass Graft (CABG). Most evidence indicates that CABG - the more invasive procedure - leads...

The objective of this paper is to define the relationship between a number of family characteristics and the health of white children aged 6 to 11 years residing in those families. The partial effects of family income on health are1l and seldom statistically significant. Indeed, some health...