There is a coming wave of novel genetic therapies aiming to treat rare pediatric disease. A large literature investigates the valuation of new treatments, but the valuation of treatments for rare pediatric illness raises a host of unique issues. In this paper, we review the challenges of...

Contact tracing for COVID-19 is especially challenging because transmission often occurs in the absence of symptoms and because a purported 20% of cases cause 80% of infections, resulting in a small risk of infection for some contacts and a high risk for others. Here, we introduce risk-based...

Recent debates over health care reform, including in the context of the Military Health System (MHS) and Veterans Health Administration, highlight the dispute between public and private provision of health care services. Using novel data on childbirth claims from the MHS and drawing on the...

We examine the impact of the expansion of public prescription drug insurance coverage from Medicare Part D on the elderly and find evidence of substantial crowd-out. Using detailed data from the 2002-7 waves of the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), we estimate that the extension of Part D...

Concerns over the impacts of hospital strikes on patient welfare led to substantial delay in the ability of hospitals to unionize. Once allowed, hospitals unionized rapidly and now represent one of the largest union sectors of the U.S. economy. Were the original fears of harmful hospital strikes...

The effect of vouchers on sorting between private and public schools depends upon the price elasticity of demand for private schooling. Estimating this elasticity is empirically challenging because prices and quantities are jointly determined in the market for private schooling. We exploit a...

The Medicare Part D Prescription Drug Plan represents the most significant privatization of the delivery of a public insurance benefit in recent history, with dozens of private insurers offering a wide range of products with varying prices and product features; the typical elder had a choice of...

A large international literature has documented the labor market distortions associated with social security benefits for near-retirees. In this paper, we investigate the 'other side' of social security programs, seeking to document improvements in wellbeing arising from the provision of public...

This is the introduction and summary to the fourth phase of an ongoing project on Social Security Programs and Retirement Around the World. The first phase described the retirement incentives inherent in plan provisions and documented the strong relationship across countries between social...

Regular church attendance is strongly associated with a higher probability of voting. It is an open question as to whether this association, which has been confirmed in numerous surveys, is causal. We use the repeal of the laws restricting Sunday retail activity ("Blue laws") to measure the...