Perhaps because health care is a local service sector, health economists have paid little attention to international linkages between domestic health care economies. However, the growth in domestic health care sectors is often attributed to medical innovations whose returns are earned worldwide....

End-stage renal disease (ESRD), or kidney failure, is a debilitating, costly, and increasingly common medical condition. Little is known about how different financing approaches affect ESRD outcomes and delivery of care. This paper presents results from a comparative review of 12 countries with...

Estimates of the benefits of antifraud enforcement in health care typically focus on direct monetary damages. Deterrence effects are acknowledged but unquantified. We evaluate the impact of a Department of Justice investigation of hospitals accused of billing Medicare for unnecessary implantable...

A substantial portion of the costs associated with, and the value to beneficiaries of, Social Security Disability Insurance is Medicare eligibility. However, the benefits of this eligibility can vary due to differences in state policies on supplemental Medicare coverage, also known as Medigap....

Which is the tighter constraint on private sector investment: weak property rights or limited access to external finance? From a survey of new firms in post-communist countries, we find that weak property rights discourage firms from reinvesting their profits, even when bank loans are available....

Difference-in-Difference (DID) estimators are a valuable method for identifying causal effects in the public health researcher's toolkit. A growing methods literature points out potential problems with DID estimators when treatment is staggered in adoption and varies with time. Despite this, no...

Using micro data on virtually all of the drugs and diseases of over 500,000 people enrolled in Puerto Rico's Medicaid program, we examine the impact of the vintage (original FDA approval year) of drugs used to treat a patient on the patient's 3-year probability of survival, controlling for...

The health sector is filled with institutions and decision-making circumstances that create friction in markets and cognitive errors by decision makers. This paper examines the potential contributions to health economics of the ideas of behavioral economics. The discussion presented here focuses...

The program project Early Indicators of Later Work Levels, Disease and Death investigates how socioeconomic and environmental factors in early life can shape health and work levels in later life. Project researchers have approached this problem by creating a life-cycle sample that permits a...

Improved health in low-income countries could considerably improve wellbeing and possibly promote economic growth. The last decade has seen a surge in field experiments designed to understand the barriers that households and governments face in investing in health and how these barriers can be...