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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
Insights / Research BriefMar 17, 2023

Market Size and Trade in Medical Services

Jonathan I. Dingel, Joshua D. Gottlieb, Maya Lozinski, Pauline Mourot
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.
Topics:  Health care
Insights / Research BriefFeb 09, 2023

Do Conflict of Interests Disclosures Work? Evidence From Citations In Medical Journals

Christian Leuz, Anup Malani, Maximilian Muhn, Laszlo Jakab
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.
Topics:  Health care
Insights / Research BriefJan 26, 2023

Rationing Medicine Through Bureaucracy: Authorization Restrictions in Medicare

Zarek Brot-Goldberg, Samantha Burn, Timothy Layton, Boris Vabson
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.
Topics:  Health care
Insights / Research BriefJan 24, 2023

Achieving Universal Health Insurance Coverage In the United States: Addressing Market Failures or Providing a Social Floor?

Katherine Baicker, Amitabh Chandra, Mark Shepard
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.
Topics:  Health care