Subsidies for health insurance for chronically ill, high-cost individuals may increase coverage in the broader population by improving the functioning of insurance markets. In this paper, we assess an historical example of a policy intervention of this sort, the extension of Medicare to the...

What are the important tradeoffs in consulting a single expert for both diagnosis and treatment? On one hand, an integrated diagnostician may have the incentive to recommend treatments that are not in the buyer's best interests. On the other hand, joint production of diagnosis and treatment by...

During the contest for Kansas attorney general in 2006, an organization sent out 6 pieces of mail criticizing the incumbent's conduct in office. We exploit a discontinuity in the rule used to select which households received the mailings to identify the causal effect of mail on vote choice and...

We test whether the generosity of employer-sponsored health insurance facilitates the exercise of market power by hospitals. We construct indices of health plan generosity and the price and volume of hospital services using data from Truven MarketScan for 601 counties from 2001-2007. We use...

In this paper, we estimate how hospital ownership of physicians' practices affects their patients' hospital choices. We match data on the hospital admissions of Medicare beneficiaries, including the identity of their admitting physician, with data on the identity of the owner of the admitting...

Although doctors and hospitals own their patients' medical records, state and federal laws require that they provide patients with a copy at "reasonable cost." We examine the effects of state laws that cap the fees that doctors and hospitals are allowed to charge patients for a copy of their...

Although a substantial body of research suggests that the discretion of discretion of actors in the criminal justice system is important, there is disagreement in the existing empirical literature over its role. Studies in this literature generally hypothesize that discretion plays one of two...

Previous research suggests that "direct" reforms to the liability system -- reforms designed to reduce the level of compensation to potential claimants -- reduce medical expenditures without important consequences for patient health outcomes. We extend this research by identifying the mechanisms...

The recent rise of specialty hospitals -- typically for-profit firms that are at least partially owned by physicians -- has led to substantial debate about their effects on the cost and quality of care. Advocates of specialty hospitals claim they improve quality and lower cost; critics contend...

`Defensive medicine' is a potentially serious social problem: if fear of liability drives health care providers to administer treatments that do not have worthwhile medical benefits, then the current liability system may generate inefficiencies many times greater than the costs of compensating...