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%.

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.

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.

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.

Larger regions are more efficient at producing medical services. This leaves policymakers with a trade-off between concentrating medical care production in more efficient large regions and promoting healthcare access in less efficient small regions. Production and travel subsidies can both increase access to healthcare but impact patients, providers, and neighboring regions differently.

Disclosures of financial ties between drug companies and researchers in medical journals negatively affect readers’ citation behavior, consistent with the hypothesis that other researchers discount articles with disclosed conflicts.

Beneficiaries of Medicare Part D who face restrictions on a drug reduce their use by 26.8%, reducing drug spending by $96 per beneficiary-year, while only generating about $10 in paperwork costs.

Providing a basic bundle of publicly funded services, while allowing individuals to purchase additional coverage, could expand US health coverage in a financially sustainable way that maintained incentives for innovation.