Proposals to create a national health care plan such as "Medicare for All" rely heavily on reducing the prices that insurers pay for health care. These changes affect physicians' short-run incentives for care provision and may also change health care providers' incentives to invest in capacity,...

We analyze the incidence of public-employee health benefits. Because these benefits are negotiated through the political process, relevant labor market institutions deviate significantly from the competitive, private-sector benchmark. Empirically, we find that roughly 15 percent of the cost of...

Innovation is part idea generation and part development. We build a model of “innovating-bydoing,” whereby ideas come to practitioners. Successful innovation requires that practitioners’ideas be developed through costly effort. Our model nests existing theories of laboratory researchand...

Over the last decade, the U.S. Medicare program has added new billing codes to enhance the financial rewards for Chronic Care Management and Transitional Care Management. We show that the take-up of these new billing codes is gradual and exhibits substantial variations across markets and...

We analyze wartime prosthetic device patents to investigate how demand and procurement policy can shape medical innovation. We use machine learning tools to develop new data describing the aspects of medical and mechanical innovations that are emphasized in patent documents. Our analysis of...

Over the last decade, the U.S. Medicare program has added new billing codes to enhance the financial rewards for Chronic Care Management and Transitional Care Management. We show that the take-up of these new billing codes is gradual and exhibits substantial variations across markets and...

Innovation is part idea generation and part development. We build a model of "innovating-by-doing," whereby ideas come to practitioners. Successful innovation requires that practitioners' ideas be developed through costly effort. Our model nests existing theories of laboratory research and...