Theory suggests that spatial separation of racial and ethnic groups can have both positive and negative effects on the economic performance of minorities. Racial segregation may be damaging because it curtails informational connections with the larger community or because concentrations of...

One popular option for health care reform in the U.S. is to make particular groups, such as children, eligible for public health insurance coverage. A key question in assessing the cost of this option is the extent to which public eligibility will crowd out the private insurance coverage of...

We explore economic model of health behaviors. While the standard economic model of health as an investment is generally supported empirically, the ability of this model to explain heterogeneity across individuals is extremely limited. Most prominently, the correlation of different health...

This paper examines the failure of the private market to fully insure long-term care. I argue that the failure is a result of large intertemporal variability in the cost of long-term care. Unlike variability in cross section use, variability in the cost of care affects everyone in a pool and...

While Americans are less healthy than Europeans along some dimensions (like obesity), Americans are significantly less likely to smoke than their European counterparts. This difference emerged in the 1970s and it is biggest among the most educated. The puzzle becomes larger once we account for...

The introduction of Medicare in 1965 was the single largest change in health insurance coverage in U.S. history. Many economists and commentators have conjectured that the introduction of Medicare may have also been an important impetus for the development of new drugs that are now commonly used...

We address long-standing problems in measuring health care prices by estimating two medical care price indices. The first, a Service Price Index, prices specific medical services, as does the current CPI. The second, a Cost of Living Index, measures the net valuation of treating a health...

During the past two decades, several public and private organizations have initiated programs to report publicly on the quality of medical care provided by specific hospitals and physicians. These programs have sparked broad debate among economists and policy makers concerning whether, and to...

We study the impact of economic crisis on health in Mexico. There have been four wide-scale economic crises in Mexico in the past two decades, the most recent in 1995-96. We find that mortality rates for the very young and the elderly increase or decline less rapidly in crisis years as compared...