Health information technology (IT) adoption, it is argued, will dramatically improve patient care. We study the impact of hospital IT adoption on patient outcomes focusing on the roles of technological and organizational complements in affecting IT's value and explore underlying mechanisms...

The US health care sector is, by most accounts, extraordinarily inefficient. Health information technology (IT) has been championed as a tool that can transform health care delivery. Recently, the federal government has taken an active role in promoting health IT diffusion. There is little...

This paper studies the effects of nursing home unionization on numerous labor, establishment, and consumer outcomes using a regression discontinuity design. We find negative effects of unionization on staffing levels and no decline in care quality, suggesting positive labor productivity effects....

This paper investigates the impact of Medicare HMO penetration on the medical care expenditures incurred by Medicare fee-for-service enrollees. We find that increasing penetration leads to reduced health care spending on fee-for-service beneficiaries. In particular, a one percentage point...

In the 1990s the US hospital industry consolidated. This paper estimates the impact of the wave of hospital mergers on welfare focusing on the impact on consumer surplus for the under-65 population. For the purposes of quantifying the price impact of consolidations, hospitals are modeled as an...

Insurance plan design has important implications for consumer welfare. In this paper, we model insurance design in the Medicare prescription drug coverage market and show that strategic private insurer incentives impose a fiscal externality on the traditional Medicare program. We document that...

The standard Medicare Part D drug insurance contract is nonlinear—with reduced subsidies in a coverage gap—resulting in a dynamic purchase problem. We consider enrollees who arrived near the gap early in the year and show that they should expect to enter the gap with high probability,...

This paper studies the effects of nursing home unionization on numerous labor, establishment, and consumer outcomes using a regression discontinuity design. We find negative effects of unionization on staffing levels and no decline in care quality, suggesting positive labor productivity effects....

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...

The objective of this study is to estimate the effects of competition for both Medicare and HMO patients on the quality decisions of hospitals in Southern California. We use discharge data from the State of California for the period 1989-1993. The outcome variables are the risk-adjusted hospital...