The US health care sector is large and growing - health care spending in 2011 amounted to $2.7 trillion and 18% of GDP. Approximately half of health care output is allocated via markets. In this paper, we analyze the industrial organization literature on health care markets focusing on the...

We seek to investigate whether managed health care can affect mortality, and if so, through which mechanisms. We estimate the impact of Medicare+Choice (M+C), Medicare's managed care program, on elderly mortality, using a county-level panel from 1993 to 2000. We control for endogenous M+C...

During the 1990s US healthcare markets underwent a significant transformation. Managed care rose to become the dominant form of insurance in the private sector. Also, a wave of hospital consolidation occurred. In 1990, the mean population-weighted hospital Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) in a...

While economic theories indicate that market power by downstream firms can potentially counteract market power upstream, antitrust policy is opaque about whether to incorporate countervailing market power in merger analyses. We use detailed national claims data from the healthcare sector to...

We seek to investigate whether managed health care can affect mortality, and if so, through which mechanisms. We estimate the impact of Medicare+Choice (M+C), Medicare's managed care program, on elderly mortality, using a county-level panel from 1993 to 2000. We control for endogenous M+C...

This paper develops new econometric methods to infer hospital quality in a model with discrete dependent variables and non-random selection. Mortality rates in patient discharge records are widely used to infer hospital quality. However, hospital admission is not random and some hospitals may...