The Becker Friedman Institute for Economics (BFI) serves as a hub for cutting-edge analysis and research across the entire University of Chicago economics community, uniting researchers from the Booth School of Business, the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics, the...
Inspired by our namesakes, Nobel Laureates Gary Becker and Milton Friedman, who believed that economics research could help improve the world, BFI works with the Chicago Economics community to turn its evidence-based research into real-world impact.
EDE is a University of Chicago Summer Institute designed to identify and support talented undergraduate students from a broad range of backgrounds interested in the study of economics.
Standard rational learning models with information frictions can explain consumers’ heterogeneous macroeconomic beliefs but not their systematic bias. Using novel data on 47,000 consumers across 47 countries representing 90% of global GDP, we document novel facts that can inspire realistic...
Lubos Pastor, Robert F. Stambaugh, and Lucian A. Taylor
We quantify the U.S. corporate sector’s carbon externality by computing the sector’s “carbon burden”—the present value of social costs of its future carbon emissions. Our baseline estimate of the carbon burden is 131% of total corporate equity value. Among individual...
When does a Sender, in a Sender-Receiver game, strictly value commitment? In a setting with finite actions and finite states, we establish that, generically, Sender values commitment if and only if he values randomization. In other words, commitment has no...
Event·Apr 19, 2019, 12:00 PM·University of Chicago, Saieh Hall for Economics, Rm 021
Friedman Forum: The Effect of Health Insurance on Spending, Health, and Well-Being — Evidence and Implications for Reform
Featuring Katherine Baicker, Dean and the Emmett Dedmon Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy
Apr192019
The national debate over the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has involved substantial discussion about what effects — if any — insurance coverage has on health care, health, and well-being. The idea that the law’s replacement might lead to millions of Americans losing coverage has brought this question into sharp focus.
Evidence from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, of which Dean Baicker is a principal investigator, provided a unique opportunity to gauge the effects of expanding access to public health insurance on the health care use, financial strain, and health of low-income adults using a randomized controlled design. In the year following the random assignment, the treatment group had higher health care utilization, lower out-of-pocket medical expenditures and medical debt, and better self-reported physical and mental health than the control group, but did not have detectable improvements in physical health conditions like high blood pressure – leaving policy-makers with tough choices in balancing costs and benefits.
On April 19, Harris Dean Katherine Baicker discussed her recent research on these and other topics during BFI’s spring Friedman Forum, a luncheon series that offers students an opportunity for informal discussions with prominent economists.