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作者:Alexander, Diane
作者单位:Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - Chicago
摘要:Billions of dollars have been spent on pilot programs searching for ways to reduce health care costs. I study one such program, in which hospitals pay doctors bonuses for reducing the total hospital costs of admitted Medicare patients. Doctors respond to the bonuses by becoming more likely to admit patients whose treatment can generate high bonuses and sorting healthier patients into participating hospitals. Conditional on patient health, however, doctors do not reduce costs or change procedur...
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作者:Dube, Oeindrila; Harish, S. P.
作者单位:University of Chicago; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要:Do states experience more peace under female leadership? We examine this question in the context of Europe over the fifteenth to twentieth centuries. We use gender of the firstborn and presence of a sister among previous monarchs as instruments for queenly rule. We find that polities led by queens engaged in war more than polities led by kings. While single queens were more likely to be attacked than single kings, married queens were more likely to attack than married kings. These results sugg...
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作者:Borovicka, Jaroslav
作者单位:New York University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要:I analytically characterize the long-run behavior of an economy with two types of agents who differ in their beliefs and are endowed with homothetic recursive preferences. Agents with more incorrect beliefs dominate, or agents with different accuracy of their beliefs coexist in the long run, for broad ranges of plausible parameterizations when risk aversion is greater than the inverse of the intertemporal elasticity of substitution. The results highlight a crucial interaction between risk shar...
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作者:Anderson, D. Mark; Brown, Ryan; Charles, Kerwin Kofi; Rees, Daniel I.
作者单位:Montana State University System; Montana State University Bozeman; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Colorado System; University of Colorado Denver; Yale University
摘要:Exploiting variation across states and municipalities in the timing and details of midwifery laws introduced during the period 1900-1940 and using data assembled from various primary sources, we find that requiring midwives to be licensed reduced maternal mortality by 7%-8% and may have led to modest reductions in infant mortality. These estimates represent the strongest evidence to date that licensing restrictions can improve the health of consumers and are directly relevant to ongoing policy...
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作者:Barth, Daniel; Papageorge, Nicholas W.; Thom, Kevin
作者单位:University of Southern California; Johns Hopkins University; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Wisconsin System; University of Wisconsin Madison
摘要:We show that genetic endowments linked to educational attainment strongly and robustly predict wealth at retirement. The estimated relationship is not fully explained by flexibly controlling for education and labor income. We therefore investigate a host of additional mechanisms that could account for the gene-wealth gradient, including inheritances, mortality, risk preferences, portfolio decisions, beliefs about the probabilities of macroeconomic events, and planning horizons. We provide evid...
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作者:Geruso, Michael; Layton, Timothy
作者单位:University of Texas System; University of Texas Austin; National Bureau of Economic Research; Harvard University; Harvard Medical School
摘要:In most US health insurance markets, plans face strong incentives to upcode the patient diagnoses they report to the regulator, as these affect the risk-adjusted payments that plans receive. We show that enrollees in private Medicare plans generate 6%-16% higher diagnosis-based risk scores than they would under fee-for-service Medicare, where diagnoses do not affect most provider payments. Our estimates imply that upcoding generates billions in excess public spending and significant distortion...
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作者:Benzarti, Youssef; Carloni, Dorian; Harju, Jarkko; Kosonen, Tuomas
作者单位:University of California System; University of California Santa Barbara; National Bureau of Economic Research; Congressional Budget Office; VATT Institute for Economic Research
摘要:This paper provides evidence that prices respond significantly more strongly to increases than to decreases in value-added taxes (VATs). First, using two plausibly exogenous VAT changes, we show that prices respond twice as much to VAT increases as to VAT decreases. Second, we show that this asymmetry results in higher equilibrium profits and markups. Third, we find that firms operating with low profit margins are particularly likely to respond asymmetrically to VAT changes. Fourth, these asym...
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作者:Pastor, Lubos; Veronesi, Pietro
作者单位:Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR); National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Chicago; National Bank of Slovakia; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Chicago; Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR)
摘要:We develop a model of political cycles driven by time-varying risk aversion. Agents choose to work in the public or private sector and to vote Democratic or Republican. In equilibrium, when risk aversion is high, agents elect Democrats-the party promising more redistribution. The model predicts higher average stock market returns under Democratic presidencies, explaining the well-known presidential puzzle. The model can also explain why economic growth has been faster under Democratic presiden...
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作者:Hansman, Christopher; Hjort, Jonas; Leon-Ciliotta, Gianmarco; Teachout, Matthieu
作者单位:Imperial College London; Columbia University; Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR); National Bureau of Economic Research; Pompeu Fabra University
摘要:We study the relationship between firms' output quality and organizational structure. Using data on the production and transaction chain that makes up Peruvian fish meal manufacturing, we establish three results. First, firms integrate suppliers when the quality premium rises for exogenous reasons. Second, suppliers change their behavior to better maintain input quality when vertically integrated. Third, firms produce a higher share of high-quality output when weather and supplier availability...
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作者:Chari, V. V.; Dovis, Alessandro; Kehoe, Patrick J.
作者单位:University of Minnesota System; University of Minnesota Twin Cities; Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - Minneapolis; University of Pennsylvania; Stanford University; University of London; University College London
摘要:When is financial repression-namely, policies that force banks to hold government debt-optimal? With commitment, such policies are never optimal because they crowd out banks' productive investments. Without commitment, they are optimal when governments need to issue unusually large amounts of debt, such as during wartime. In such times, repression allows governments to credibly issue more debt. Repression increases credibility because when banks hold government debt, defaults dilute net worth,...