Although learning-by-doing is believed to be an important source of productivity growth, there is limited evidence that production volume affects productivity in a causal sense. We document evidence of learning-by-doing in a highly skilled profession where stakes are high; advanced cancer...

Learning-by-doing is a fundamental concept in economics but a challenging one to document in high-skilled settings due to non-random assignment of workers to tasks and lacking performance measures. Our paper overcomes these challenges in the context of heart attack treatments in Sweden, where we...

We assess the performance of three hospital merger simulation methods by means of a Monte Carlo experiment. We first specify a rich theoretical model of hospital markets and use it to generate “true” price effects of a large number of hospital mergers. We then use the theoretical model to...

Learning-by-doing is a fundamental concept in economics but a challenging one to document in high-skilled settings due to non-random assignment of workers to tasks and lacking performance measures. Our paper overcomes these challenges in the context of heart attack treatments in Sweden, where we...

Do healthcare providers pick their patients? This paper uses patient-level administrative data on skilled nursing facilities in California to estimate a structural model of selective admission practices in the nursing home industry. I exploit within-facility covariation between occupancy and...

The United States spends twice as much per person on pharmaceuticals as European countries, in large part because prices are much higher in the US. This fact has led policymakers to consider legislation for price controls. This paper assesses the effects of a US international reference pricing...

Even in wealthy economies, access to medicines is increasingly affected by medicine shortages – an issue exacerbated with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of this paper was to examine the extent and nature of medicine shortages in OECD countries (pre-COVID-19) and explore the...

In this paper, we argue that lower prices for pharmaceuticals can be achieved by fostering a new type of competition in the pharmaceutical industry. Lower drug development costs, and hence prices, can be brought about by abolishing national drug administrations and replacing them with private...

This paper studies the impact of private equity (PE) acquisitions on quality of care in U.S. nursing homes. To do this, we examine 77 PE deals covering 1451 nursing homes between 1993 and 2017. We find significant heterogeneity in the effect of PE ownership according to levels of local market...

In early 2004, the U.S. Government initiated the Medicare Discount Drug Card Program, which created a market for drug cards that allowed their subscribers to obtain discounts on their prescription drug purchases. Pharmacy-level prices for several drugs were posted on the program website weekly...