Self-control devices, such as rehabilitation programs, group commitment, and informal fines, can make time-inconsistent smokers better off. Health economists have used this result to argue in favor of cigarette taxes that restrain smoking. However, taxes alone are not Pareto-improving overall,...

Previous research has found that Medicare benefits flow primarily to the most economically advantaged groups and that the financial returns to Medicare are consequently higher for the rich than for the poor. Taking a different approach, we find very different results. According to the Medicare...

A fair amount of research suggests that health has been improving among the elderly over the past 10 to 15 years. Comparatively little research effort, however, has been focused on analyzing disability among the young. In this paper, we argue that health among the young has been deteriorating,...

Concern is often voiced about the declining quality of American schoolteachers. This paper shows that, while the relative quality of teachers is declining, this decline is a result of technical change, which improves the specialized knowledge of skilled workers outside teaching, but not the...

Recent breakthroughs in the treatment of HIV have coincided with an increase in infection rates and an eventual slowing of reductions in HIV mortality. These trends may be causally related, if treatment improves the health and functional status of HIV+ individuals and allows them to engage in...

We develop a new framework for valuing health and longevity improvements that departs from conventional but unrealistic assumptions of full annuitization and deterministic health. Our framework can value the prevention of mortality and of illness, and it can quantify the effects of retirement...

Recent research has documented a link between consumer risk preferences over health and the willingness to pay (WTP) for medical technologies. However, the absence of empirical health risk preference estimates so far limits the implementation of this generalized risk-adjusted cost-effectiveness...

Pharmaceutical firms currently spend over $4 billion on direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) of prescription drugs, a nearly 30-fold increase since 1993 that has led to much debate about its value to patients. We examine how DTCA influences drug utilization along the extensive and intensive...

Economists think of medical innovation as a valuable but risky good, producing health benefits but increasing financial risk. This perspective overlooks how innovation can lower physical risks borne by healthy patients facing the prospect of future disease. We present an alternative framework...

A controversial feature of Medicare Part D is its reliance on private insurers to negotiate drug prices and rebates with retail pharmacies and drug manufacturers. Central to this controversy is whether increases in market power--an undesirable feature in most settings--confer benefits in health...