Prior studies suggest that, with elastically supplied inputs, free entry may lead to an inefficiently high number of firms in equilibrium. Under input scarcity, however, the welfare loss from free entry is reduced. Further, free entry may increase use of high-quality inputs, as oligopolistic...

There is a pronounced gradient in disability across socioeconomic groups, with better educated and higher income groups reporting substantially less disability. In this paper, we consider why that is the case, focusing on impairments in basic physical and cognitive aspects of living for the...

Prior studies suggest that, with elastically supplied inputs, free entry may lead to an inefficiently high number of firms in equilibrium. Under input scarcity, however, the welfare loss from free entry is reduced. Further, free entry may increase use of high-quality inputs, as oligopolistic...

National health care goals generally include providing broad access to appropriate amounts of high-quality health care at appropriate cost to the ultimate payers. Yet all countries, regardless of how they deliver and finance health care, struggle to achieve a sustainable balance among the...

Integrating the health services and insurance industries, as health maintenance organizations (HMOs) do, could lower expenditure by reducing either the quantity of services or unit price or both. We compare the treatment of heart disease in HMOs and traditional insurance plans using two datasets...

Increases in the cost of providing health insurance must have some effect on labor markets, either in lower wages, changes in the composition of employment, or both. Despite a presumption that most of this effect will be in the form of lower wages, we document a significant effect on work hours...

We address long-standing problems in measuring medical inflation by estimating two types of price indices. The first, a Service Price Index, prices specific medical services, as does the current CPI. The second, a Cost of Living Index, measures a quality-adjusted cost of treating a health...

Given a choice between spending more money on medical care or on other consumption goods, which should society choose? Should the National Institutes of Health devote a larger part of its research budget to AIDS or to cancer? Has the increased inequality of income in the United States led to...

Theory suggests that spatial separation of racial and ethnic groups can have both positive and negative effects on the economic performance of minorities. Racial segregation may be damaging because it curtails informational connections with the larger community or because concentrations of...