I investigate the relationship between physician pay, C-section use, and infant health, using vital statistics data and newly collected data on Medicaid payments to physicians. First, I confirm past results - when Medicaid pays doctors relatively more for C-sections, they perform them more...

Billions of dollars have been spent on pilot programs searching for ways to reduce healthcare costs. I study one such program, where hospitals pay doctors bonuses for reducing the total hospital costs of admitted Medicare patients (a "bundled payment"). Doctors respond to the bonuses by becoming...

In this paper, we investigate one factor that can directly contribute to-as well as indirectly shed light on the other causes of-the gender gap in academic publishing: length of peer review. Using detailed administrative data from an economics field journal, we find that, conditional on...

Car exhaust is a major source of air pollution, but little is known about its impacts on population health. We exploit the dispersion of emissions-cheating diesel cars−which secretly polluted up to 150 times as much as gasoline cars−across the United States from 2008-2015 as a natural experiment...

I investigate the relationship between physician pay, C-section use, and infant health, using vital statistics data and newly collected data on Medicaid payments to physicians. First, I confirm past results - when Medicaid pays doctors relatively more for C-sections, they perform them more...

We examine whether relaxing occupational licensing to allow nurse practitioners (NPs) - registered nurses with advanced degrees - to prescribe medication without physician oversight is associated with improved population mental health. Exploiting time-series variation in independent prescriptive...

Billions of dollars have been spent on pilot programs searching for ways to reduce healthcare costs. I study one such program, where hospitals pay doctors bonuses for reducing the total hospital costs of admitted Medicare patients (a "bundled payment"). Doctors respond to the bonuses by becoming...

The difficulties that Medicaid beneficiaries face accessing medical care are often attributed to the program's low reimbursement rates relative to other payers. There is little evidence, however, as to the actual effects of Medicaid doctor payment rates on access and health outcomes for...

Retail clinics are an innovation that has the potential to improve competition in health care markets. We use the universe of emergency room (ER) visits in New Jersey from 2006-2014 to examine the impact of retail clinics on ER usage. We find significant effects of retail clinics on ER visits...