Using data from the 1994 through 1998 Consumer Expenditure Surveys, we compare household spending on 16 different goods (food at home, food away from home, housing, transportation, alcohol and tobacco, interest, furniture and appliances, home maintenance, clothing, utilities, medical care,...

Women and men tend to work in different occupations. Although a great deal of research has been devoted to the measurement of trends in occupation segregation by gender, very little work has focused on the underlying job choice process that generates this segregation. What makes men and women...

We examine whether the decline in the availability of employer-provided health insurance is a phenomenon common to all jobs or is concentrated only on certain jobs. In particular, we investigate the extent to which employers have continued to provide health insurance on what we term reducing the...

The most widely used measure of employer health care costs, the health insurance component of the Employment Cost Index, indicates that cost growth has decelerated since 1989. In recent years employer expenditures per hour worked have even declined in nominal dollars. This paper analyzes the...

Report cards on provider performance are intended to improve consumer decision-making and address information gaps in the market for quality. However, inadequate risk adjustment of report-card measures often biases comparisons across providers. We test whether going to a skilled nursing facility...

The educational attainment of siblings is highly correlated. We test for a specific type of peer effect between siblings in educational attainment: genetic nurture. Specifically, we test whether a person's educational attainment is correlated with their sibling's polygenic score (PGS) for...

One of the most important changes to the United States health care system over the last two decades is the emergence of pay-for-performance as a way to encourage hospitals and other providers to improve quality of care. Unlike fee-for-service, these value-based purchasing programs measure...

The ongoing debate about the economic causes of obesity has focused on the changing relative prices of diet and exercise. This paper uses a model that explicitly includes time and spatially varying community-level urbanicity and price measures as instruments to obtain statistically correct...

Previous estimates on the association between body weight and wages in the literature have been contingent on education and occupation. This paper examines the direct effect of BMI on wages and the indirect effects operating through education and occupation choice, particularly for late-teen BMI...

There is much debate about whether the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill -- the greatest expansion of Medicare benefits since its creation in 1965 -- will improve the health of elderly Americans, and how much it will cost. We model how insurance affects medical care utilization, and subsequently,...