This paper reports the first test of how exogenous health shocks impact people's longevity expectations. The analysis exploits the panel structure of the Health and Retirement Study and tests whether smokers, former smokers and those who never smoked react differently to serious, smoking related...

Using four waves of the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) this paper tests whether longevity expectations predict actual mortality at the individual level. The results suggest longevity expectations do predict mortality reasonably well. Serious health shocks and new activity limitations do...

We examine how changes in hospital ownership to and from for-profit status affect quality and Medicare payments per hospital stay. We hypothesize that hospitals converting to for-profit ownership boost postacquisition profitability by reducing dimensions of quality not readily observed by...

This study investigates whether higher input use per stay in the hospital (treatment intensity) and longer length of stay improve outcomes of care. We allow for endogeneity of intensity and length of stay by estimating a quasi-maximum-likelihood discrete factor model, where the distribution of...