The pharmaceutical market has experienced a massive wave of vertical integration between pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) and health insurers in recent years. Using a unique dataset on insurer-PBM contracts, we document increasing vertical integration in Medicare Part D-vertically integrated...

We study the role of physicians in driving geographic variation of US healthcare utilization. We estimate a model that separates variation in average utilization of Medicare beneficiaries due to physicians, non-physician supply side factors, and patient demand. The model is identified by...

Incomplete health insurance enrollment is a persistent U.S. challenge despite large subsidies. We ask whether hassles built into enrollment systems matter for insurance take-up and targeting. Studying removal of an auto-enrollment policy, we find that a small hassle - a requirement to actively...

We present results from a nationally representative survey of American adults, guided by a simple theoretical model expressing health care-seeking behavior as a function of economic and behavioral fundamentals and highlighting the role of trust. We report several findings. First, we document a...

Medicare has increased the use of performance pay incentives for hospitals, with the goal of increasing care coordination across providers, reducing market frictions, and ultimately to improve quality of care. This paper provides new empirical evidence by using novel operations and claims data...

We report results from the first randomization of a regulatory reform in the health sector. The reform established minimum quality standards for patient safety, an issue that has become increasingly salient following the Ebola and COVID-19 epidemics. In our experiment, all 1348 health facilities...

For those who follow health and technology news, it is difficult to go more than a few days without reading about a compelling new application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to health care. AI has myriad applications in medicine and its adjacent industries, with AI-driven tools already in use...

The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly affected the United States healthcare system, resulting in major disruptions in the delivery of essential care and causing crippling financial losses that threaten the viability of millions of medical practices. There is little empirical evidence on the types...

There is substantial evidence that cost-sharing in medical care constrains total health spending. However, there is relatively little (and unclear) evidence on its health effects, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. This paper re-evaluates the link between outpatient cost-sharing...

Nonprofits supply many tax-financed services like healthcare and education. Yet nonprofits are absent from the canonical property rights theory of ownership. Extending the government "make or buy" decision to nonprofits and ex post frictions based on contracts as reference points suggests that...