To combat adverse selection, governments increasingly base payments to health plans and providers on enrollees' scores from risk-adjustment formulae. In 2004, Medicare began to risk-adjust capitation payments to private Medicare Advantage (MA) plans to reduce selection-driven overpayments. But...

Exploiting within-firm, over-time variation in plan parameters for nearly 10,000 Long Term Disability (LTD) policies held by US employers, we present the first empirical analysis of the determinants of private LTD spells. We find that a shorter waiting period and a higher replacement rate...

In 2005, as the result of a World Trade Organization mandate, India began to implement product patents for pharmaceuticals that were compliant with the 1995 Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). We combine pharmaceutical product sales data for India with a newly gathered...

Generic drugs comprise an increasing share of total prescriptions dispensed in the U.S., rising from nearly 50 percent in 1999 to 75 percent in 2009. The generic drug market has typically been viewed at the wholesale level as a competitive market with price approaching marginal costs. However,...

Generic drugs comprise an increasing share of total prescriptions dispensed in the U.S., rising from nearly 50% in 1999 to 75% in 2009. The generic drug market has typically been viewed at the wholesale level as a competitive market with price approaching marginal costs. However, the large...

Combining administrative data from the U.S. Army, Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the U.S. Social Security Administration, we analyze the effect of the VA’s Disability Compensation (DC) program on veterans’ labor force participation and earnings. The largely unstudied Disability...

Chapter 1: The Economic Effects of Medical Innovations: Vioxx and Labor SupplyDespite dramatic improvements in medical technology over time, comparatively little attention has been paid to the effect of these innovations on economic outcomes. This study uses seven overlapping panels of the...

My dissertation is composed of three essays on Development Economics in China. The first chapter, co-authored with Hongbin Li, evaluates the impact of the 8-7 Plan, the second wave of China's poverty alleviation program, on rural income growth at the county level over the period 1994-2000. Since...

How do improvements in information impact market performance? This dissertation examines the effect of an innovative initiative launched by a private company in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Beginning in October 2000, it set up 1700 internet kiosks and 45 warehouses that provide...

In Chapter 1, we study an intervention in which the Peruvian government provided public payphones to 6,509 rural villages that did not have communication services before. We show that the intervention timing was orthogonal to potential outcomes and exploit it using a panel of treated villages....