Many critics believed that the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA86) would discourage saving. Yet personal saving rates have rebounded since 1987. This rebound might have been caused by a general decline in marginal tax rates on household saving. And we estimate, at least for the 1980s, a positive...

Technological advances in health care have been shown to yield large average health benefits for the U.S. elderly population. However, less is known about the marginal or incremental benefits of health care spending. We use geographical variations in health care spending to measure the marginal...

Frequent shifts in tax policy can increase uncertainty about future net-of-tax wages and interest income. This paper measures the impact of uncertain tax policy on savings, labor supply, and welfare in the United States. A vector autoregression model with six variables was estimated which found...

In the past two decades the widely reported personal saving rate in the United States has dropped from double digits to below zero. First, we attempt to account for the decline in the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) saving rate. The macroeconomic literature suggests that about half...

This paper examines 313 U.S. areas for differences in medical care utilization and mortality of whites ages 65-84 in 1990. The variables included in the analysis are education, real income, cigarette sales, obesity, air pollution, percent black, and dummy variables for seven regions and five...

The U.S. health system has been described as the most competitive, heterogeneous, inefficient, fragmented, and advanced system of care in the world. In this paper, we consider two questions: First, is the U.S. health care system productively efficient relative to other wealthy countries, in the...