OBJECTIVE: To describe the relative importance of health care market structure and county-level demographics in determining rates of hospice use. DATA SOURCES: Medicare claims data for a cohort of elderly patients newly diagnosed with lung cancer, colon cancer, stroke, or heart attack in 1993,...

Alternative ways of caring for seriously ill patients might have implications not only for patients' own outcomes, but also, indirectly, for the health outcomes of their family members. Clinical observation suggests that patients who die "good deaths" may impose less stress on their spouses....

Heart attack, or acute myocardial infarction (AMI), is a leading cause of death in the United States (US). The most effective therapy for AMI is rapid revascularization: the mechanical opening of the clogged artery in the heart. Forty-four percent of patients with AMI who are admitted to a...

We address leadership emergence and the possibility that there is a partially innate predisposition to occupy a leadership role. Employing twin design methods on data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we estimate the heritability of leadership role occupancy at 24%. Twin...

We explore the influence of genetic variation on subjective well-being by employing a twin design and genetic association study. In a nationally representative twin sample, we first show that 33% of the variation in life satisfaction is explained by genetic variation. Although previous studies...

Peers have a powerful effect on adolescents’ beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. Here, we examine the role of social networks in the spread of attitudes towards sexuality using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Although we found evidence that both...

Research on happiness has produced valuable insights into the sources of subjective well-being that are of importance to economics. A major nding from this literature is that people exhibit a "baseline" level of happiness that shows persistent strength over time. Here we explore the extent to...