To assess the consequences of advance medical directives -- which explicitly specify a patient's preferences for one or more specific types of medical treatment in the event of a loss of competence we analyze the medical care of elderly Medicare beneficiaries who died between 1985-1995. We...

'Defensive medicine' is a potentially serious social problem: if fear of liability drives health care providers to administer treatments that do not have worthwhile medical benefits, then the current liability system may generate inefficiencies much larger than the costs of compensating...

Social costs created by delay in the resolution of legal disputes have motivated an extensive theoretical literature studying the causes of delay. However, much less work has investigated a related, more policy-relevant question: how do legal institutions empirically affect delay in settlement?...

Health care report cards - public disclosure of patient health outcomes at the level of the individual physician and/or hospital - may address important informational asymmetries in markets for health care, but they may also give doctors and hospitals incentives to decline to treat more...

Applying principles of merger evaluation to the health care industry in general, and to hospital markets in particular, poses several unique challenges. Definition of relevant geographic markets and assessment of the consequences of changes in competition for patient and social welfare are...

To develop new evidence on the effects of hospital ownership and other aspects of hospital market composition on health care productivity, we analyze longitudinal data on the medical expenditures and health outcomes of the vast majority of nonrural elderly Medicare beneficiaries hospitalized for...

This paper identifies which types of patients and hospitals have abusive Medicare billings that are responsive to law enforcement. For a 20 percent random sample of elderly Medicare beneficiaries hospitalized from 1994-98 with one or more of six illnesses that are prone to abuse, we obtain...