Recent data show wide disparity between Japan and the United States in the effectiveness of their health care systems. Japan spends close to the lowest percentage of its gross domestic product on health care among OECD countries, the United States spends the highest, yet life expectancies in...

Analyses in the Economics of Aging summarizes a massive amount of new research on several popular and less-examined topics pertaining to the relationship between economics and aging. Among the many themes explored in this volume, considerable attention is given to new research on retirement...

This volume, the fourth to result from a remarkably productive collaboration between the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Japan Center for Economic Research, presents a selection of thirteen high-caliber papers addressing issues in the employment practices, labor markets, and health,...

Mergers and Productivity offers probing analyses of high-profile mergers in a variety of industries. Focusing on specific acquisitions, it illustrates the remarkable range of contingencies involved in any merger attempt. The authors clearly establish each merger's presumed objectives and the...

Is it possible that the insurance and reinsurance industries cannot handle a major catastrophe? Ten years ago, the notion that the overall cost of a single catastrophic event might exceed $10 billion was unthinkable. With ever increasing property-casualty risks and unabated growth in...

One of the most well-established relationships in the economics of aging is that between health and wealth. Yet this relationship is also changing in conjunction with a rapidly aging population as well as a broad evolution in how people live later in life. Building on findings from earlier...

Estimates of the impact of Certificate of Need laws on medical care have been inconsistent, possibly because not all CON laws apply to all services. Using an original dataset identifying imaging-related CON laws, we estimate the effects of CON on CT and MRI, using regression discontinuities at...

Opioid overdose death rates in the United States have risen continuously for over three decades, increasing 2,142 percent in total from 1990 to 2020. This is surprising. One might expect drug epidemics to be self-limiting, as policy and individual behavior reacts to observed deaths. We study why...