Large, unpredictable and not fully insurable health-care costs represent a source of background risk that might deter households' financial risk taking. Using panel data from the Health and Retirement Study and fixed-effects estimation, we test whether universal health insurance, like Medicare...

The public procurement of medical devices is increasingly relying on auction mechanisms to move toward more transparent procedures and to promote competition between suppliers in a market where the quality of the products matters enormously and an improper auction design could be very harmful....

This paper contributes to the literature on the role of technology shocks as source of the business cycle in two ways. First, we document that time-series of US productivity and hours are apparently affected by a structural break in the late 60's, which is likely due to a major change in the...

The public procurement of medical devices is increasingly relying on auction mechanisms to move toward more transparent procedures and to promote competition between suppliers in a market where the quality of the products matters enormously and an improper auction design could be very harmful....

This paper aims at evaluating the impact of 1998 Chinese health care reform on out-of-pocket expenditure and on saving. Existing evidence on the results achieved by this reform in terms of reduction of out-of-pocket medical expenditures is still mixed and contradictory, and very little is known...

This paper studies the relationship between medical compliance and health outcomes - hospitalization and mortality rates - using a large panel of patients residing in a local health authority in Italy. These data allow us to follow individual patients through all their accesses to public health...

This paper examines the effects of in-utero exposure to stress on lifelong labor market outcomes. We exploit a unique natural experiment that involved randomly placed Nazi raids on municipalities in Italy during WWII. We use administrative data on the universe of private sector workers in Italy...

Throughout history, technological progress has transformed population health, but the distributional effects of these gains are unclear. New substitutes for older, more expensive health technologies can produce convergence in population health outcomes, but may also be prone to "elite capture"...

This paper examines the relationship between drug price and drug quality and how it varies across two of the most common regulatory regimes in the pharmaceutical market: minimum efficacy standards (MES) and a mix of minimum efficacy standards and price control mechanisms (MES+PC). Through a...