How do for-profit and not-for-profit hospitals differ? We consider one dimension: the shifting of a patient's diagnostic related group (DRG) to one that yields a greater reimbursement from the Medicare system, also known as upcoding. It has played a major role in recent federal lawsuits against...

In his classic 1957 study of hybrid corn, Griliches emphasized the importance of economic incentives and profitability in the adoption of new technology, and this focus has been continued in the economics literature. But there is a distinct literature with roots in sociology emphasizing the...

The issue of whether higher lifetime income households save a larger fraction of their income is an important factor in the evaluation of tax and macroeconomic policy. Despite an outpouring of research on this topic in the 1950s and 1960s, the question remains unresolved and has since received...

In the past two decades, the personal saving rate in the United States has declined dramatically, from 10.6 percent of disposable personal income in 1984 to a low of 2.3 percent in 2001, before bouncing back to 3.9 percent in 2002 (U.S. Department of Commerce, 2003). There is considerable debate...

There is considerable controversy about the causes of regional variations in health care expenditures. We use vignettes from patient and physician surveys linked to Medicare expenditures at the Hospital Referral Region to test whether patient demand-side factors or physician supply-side factors...