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Insights / Research BriefOct 03, 2023

Private Actions in the Presence of Externalities: The Health Impacts of Reducing Air Pollution Peaks but not Ambient Exposure

Joshua Dean, Susanna B. Berkouwer
Improved cookstoves reduce exposure to peak cooking emissions by 42%, though impacts on overall pollution exposure are muted by high ambient pollution. The reduction in peak emissions reduces self-reported respiratory symptoms but does not improve more quantitative diagnoses such as blood pressure or blood oxygen.
Topics:  Development Economics, Energy & Environment, Health care
Insights / Research BriefAug 29, 2023

Monitoring for Waste: Evidence from Medicare Audits

Maggie Shi
Every dollar Medicare spent on monitoring generates $24–29 in government savings, mainly from the deterrence of medically unnecessary future care. Monitoring increases upfront investments in technology to assess the necessity of care.
Topics:  Health care
Insights / Research BriefJul 14, 2023

Who Values Human Capitalists’ Human Capital? The Earnings and Labor Supply of U.S. Physicians

Joshua D. Gottlieb, Maria Polyakova, Hugh Shiplett, Kevin Rinz, Victoria Udalova
Physicians’ annual earnings average $350,000 and comprise 8.6% of national healthcare spending. Government policy has a major impact on earnings: 25% of incremental Medicare spending on physician care goes to physicians personally, and physicians earn 6% of public money spent on insurance expansions.
Topics:  Health care
Insights / Research BriefJun 08, 2023

Micro- and Macroeconomic Impacts of a Place-Based Industrial Policy

Enghin Atalay, Ali Hortaçsu, Chad Syverson, Mehmet Fatih Ulu
Turkey’s Law 2012/3305 boosted economic activity among businesses in eligible industries/provinces and led to positive spillovers to the suppliers and customers of subsidized firms. In the long run, the policy reduced income inequality between regions only moderately, due to migration and spillovers.
Topics:  Industrial Organization
Insights / Research BriefMay 10, 2023

Managers and Productivity in Retail

Robert D. Metcalfe, Alexandre B. Sollaci, Chad Syverson
Individual managers impact retail business productivity substantially; replacing a manager at the bottom of the quality distribution by one at the top could increase a store’s productivity by between 50% and 100%.
Topics:  Industrial Organization
Insights / Research BriefMay 03, 2023

Local And National Concentration Trends in Jobs and Sales: The Role of Structural Transformation

David Autor, Christina Patterson, John Van Reenen
Driven by the sizable shift in sales and employment from the relatively concentrated manufacturing sector to the relatively unconcentrated service sector, local concentration in sales has increased in parallel to national sales concentration, while local concentration in employment has declined, despite rising at the national level.
Topics:  Employment & Wages, Industrial Organization
Insights / Research BriefApr 19, 2023

The Health Wedge and Labor Market Inequality

Amy Finkelstein, Casey C. McQuillan, Owen M. Zidar, Eric Zwick
The pervasiveness of employer-provided healthcare in the United States contributes to labor market inequality; under an alternative scenario where healthcare is funded by a payroll tax on firms, the college-wage premium would be 11% lower. If healthcare costs had grown at the rate of other countries, inequality would have grown less as well.
Topics:  Employment & Wages, Health care
Insights / Research BriefApr 05, 2023

100 Years of Rising Corporate Concentration

Spencer Y. Kwon, Yueran Ma, Kaspar Zimmermann
US corporate concentration has increased persistently over the past century, with the manufacturing and mining sectors consolidating at a faster pace prior to the 1970s, and with the services, retail, and wholesale sectors taking the lead since. These long-run trends appear in line with stronger economies of scale.
Topics:  Industrial Organization