We examine the effects of the State Innovation Models (SIM) on population-level health status. The SIM initiative provided $250 million to six states in 2013 for delivery system reforms. We use data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System for the years 2010 -- 2016 to compare health...

We propose a "common-agency" model for explaining inefficient contracting in the U.S. healthcare system. In our setting, common-agency problems arise when multiple payers seek to motivate a shared provider to invest in improved care coordination. Our approach differs from other common-agency...

Economic growth is persistently low following a financial crisis, possibly because of a continuing weal banking system. In a financial crisis bank health is significantly damaged. Post-crisis regulatory changes have aimed at restoring bank health, but measuring bank health by Tobin's Q, we find...

Medical divorce occurs when couples split up so that one spouse's medical bills do not deplete the assets of the healthy spouse. It has not been studied in the economics literature, but it has been discussed by attorneys and widely reported in the media. We develop a model of medical divorce...

Alan Garber and Jonathan Skinner (2008) famously conjectured that the US health care system was “uniquely inefficient” relative to other countries. We test this idea using cross-country data on prescription drug sales newly linked with an arguably objective measure of relative therapeutic...

In health care systems with a competitive health insurance market, governments or other sponsors (e.g. employers) often subsidize premiums to encourage enrolment. These subsidies are typically independent of plan choice leaving the absolute premium differences in place so as not to distort...

If health service delivery is poorly managed, then increases in inputs or ability may not translate into gains in quality. However, little is known about how to increase managerial capital to generate persistent improvements in quality. We present results from a randomized field experiment in 80...

This paper is the first to use the method of instrumental variables to estimate the causal impact of youth obesity on U.S. medical care costs. We examine data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey for 2001-2013 and instrument for child BMI using the BMI of the child's biological mother. IV...

Medicaid, the government program for providing health insurance to low-income and disabled Americans, is the largest health insurer in the United States with more than 73 million enrollees. It is also the sector of the U.S. public health insurance system that relies most heavily on the tools of...