This paper examines 313 U.S. areas for differences in medical care utilization and mortality of whites ages 65-84 in 1990. The variables included in the analysis are education, real income, cigarette sales, obesity, air pollution, percent black, and dummy variables for seven regions and five...

The U.S. health system has been described as the most competitive, heterogeneous, inefficient, fragmented, and advanced system of care in the world. In this paper, we consider two questions: First, is the U.S. health care system productively efficient relative to other wealthy countries, in the...

The Medicare program is now an important source of transfers to elderly and disabled beneficiaries, and will continue to grow rapidly in the future. Because the Medicare program is so large in magnitude, it can have significant redistributional effects. In this paper, we measure the flow of...

The authors measure the time-series property of catastrophic medical costs facing the elderly using information on medical deductions from a panel of tax returns. During the period of analysis, 1968-73, taxpayers could deduct medical expenses above 3 percent of income. They correct for the...

The land tax enjoys a distinguished pedigree in the theoretical literature on tax efficiency, yet it is rarely used as a serious revenue source in rural areas of developing countries. This article considers three drawbacks of the land tax relative to taxes on exports or marketed output: (1)...

In the past two decades, the personal saving rate in the United States has declined dramatically, from 10.6 percent of disposable personal income in 1984 to a low of 2.3 percent in 2001, before bouncing back to 3.9 percent in 2002 (U.S. Department of Commerce, 2003). There is considerable debate...

In this paper, we argue that there is more to be learned from recent research on the effectiveness of targeted saving incentives than is suggested by the wide variation in empirical estimates. First, we conclude that characterizations of saving appear to stimulate moderate amounts of new saving....

Recent legislative proposals have included restoring Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) to their pre-1987 eligibility rules. Whether IRAs are simply tax windfalls with no effect on saving, or whether IRAs stimulate saving, is a crucial issue in evaluating the effectiveness of such proposals....