In several states, the Medicaid program allows beneficiaries a choice among multiple managed care plans and traditional Medicaid. This paper uses data from a survey of New York City Medicaid beneficiaries enrolled in conventional Medicaid and in 5 Medicaid managed care plans to study the effect...

Expansions of Medicaid eligibility intend to improve access to care, and to shift care from emergency rooms and inpatient hospital care to more appropriate sites. We examine the effect of Medicaid recipiency on the level and site of medical service utilization using data from 1985 and 1987...

We examine the effect of New York City's universal pre-kindergarten program (UPK) on the health and utilization of children enrolled in Medicaid using a difference-in-regression- discontinuities design. We find that UPK increases the probability that a child is diagnosed with asthma or with...

This paper reviews the two leading methods used to project the number of AIDS cases: back calculation and extrapolation. These methods are assessed in light of key features of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and of data on the epidemic; they are also assessed in terms of the quality of the projections they...

Healthy teeth are a vital and visible component of general well-being, but there is little systematic evidence to demonstrate their economic value. In this paper, we examine one element of that value, the effect of oral health on labor market outcomes, by exploiting variation in access to...

Prior studies have examined the relationship between macroeconomic factors and health insurance for the adult population and have evaluated changes in the composition of health insurance across the income distribution. We combine these types of analysis and examine how labor market fluctuations,...

Child injury mortality rates have declined steadily over time and across causes of death. This paper investigates alternative explanations for this decline and evaluates their value. I assess changes in children's living circumstances, changes in the professional child injury knowledge base,...

Doctors and hospitals in the United States serve patients covered by many types of insurance. This overlap in the supply of health care services means that changes in the prices paid or the volume of services demanded by one group of patients may affect other patient groups. This paper examines...

Recent studies suggest that health inequalities across socio-economic groups in the US are large and have been growing. We hypothesize that, as in other, non-health contexts, this pattern occurs because more educated people are better able than to take advantage of technological advances in...

Most physicians today treat a variety of patients within their practices and operate in markets where a variety of insurance arrangements co-exist. In this paper, we propose several theoretical explanations for physician treatment patterns when the patient population is heterogeneous at the...