Search Results
Working Paper
Do Stay-at-Home Orders Cause People to Stay at Home? Effects of Stay-at-Home Orders on Consumer Behavior
We link the county-level rollout of stay-at-home orders to anonymized cell phone records and consumer spending data. We document three patterns. First, stay-at-home orders caused people to stay home: County-level measures of mobility declined 8% by the day after the stay-at-home order went into effect. Second, stay-at-home orders caused large reductions in spending in sectors associated with mobility: small businesses and large retail stores. However, consumers sharply increased spending on food delivery services after orders went into effect. Third, responses to stay-at-home orders were ...
Working Paper
Do Stay-at-Home Orders Cause People to Stay at Home? Effects of Stay-at-Home Orders on Consumer Behavior
We link the county-level rollout of stay-at-home orders to anonymized cellphone records and consumer spending data. We document three patterns. First, stay-at-home orders caused people to stay at home: county-level measures of mobility declined by between 9% and 13% by the day after the stay-at-home order went into effect. Second, stay-at-home orders caused large reductions in spending in sectors associated with mobility: restaurants and retail stores. However, food delivery sharply increased after orders went into effect. Third, there is substantial county-level heterogeneity in consumer ...
Working Paper
Just What the Nurse Practitioner Ordered: Independent Prescriptive Authority and Population Mental Health
We examine whether relaxing occupational licensing to allow nurse practitioners (NPs)?registered nurses with advanced degrees?to prescribe medication without physician oversight is associated with improved population mental health. Exploiting time-series variation in independent prescriptive authority for NPs from 1990?2014, we find that broadening prescriptive authority is associated with improvements in self-reported mental health and decreases in mental-health-related mortality, including suicides. These improvements are concentrated in areas underserved by psychiatrists and among ...
Working Paper
The Impact of Car Pollution on Infant and Child Health: Evidence from Emissions Cheating
Car exhaust is a major source of air pollution, but little is known about its impacts on population health. We exploit the dispersion of emissions-cheating diesel cars?which secretly polluted up to 150 times as much as gasoline cars?across the United States from 2008-2015 as a natural experiment to measure the health impact of car pollution. Using the universe of vehicle registrations, we demonstrate that a 10 percent cheating-induced increase in car exhaust increases rates of low birth weight and acute asthma attacks among children by 1.9 and 8.0 percent, respectively. These health impacts ...
Working Paper
Does Physician Pay Affect Procedure Choice and Patient Health? Evidence from Medicaid C-section Use
I investigate the relationship between physician pay, C-section use, and infant health, using vital statistics data and newly collected data on Medicaid payments to physicians. First, I confirm past results?when Medicaid pays doctors relatively more for C-sections, they perform them more often. I bolster the causal interpretation of this result by showing that salaried doctors do not respond to this pay differential, and by using a much larger sample of states and years. Second, unlike past work, I look at how changing physician pay affects infant health outcomes. I find that increased ...
Working Paper
Do Stay-at-Home Orders Cause People to Stay at Home? Effects of Stay-at-Home Orders on Consumer Behavior
We link the county-level rollout of stay-at-home orders during the Covid-19 pandemic to anonymized cell phone records and consumer spending data. We document three patterns. First, stay-at-home orders caused people to stay home: county-level measures of mobility declined 7–8% within two days of when the stay-at-home order went into effect. Second, stay-at-home orders caused large reductions in spending in sectors associated with mobility: small businesses and large retail chains. Third, we estimate fairly uniform responses to stay-at-home orders across the country; effects do not vary by ...
Newsletter
Measuring the relationship between business reopenings, Covid-19, and consumer behavior
On March 17, 2020, seven counties in the San Francisco Bay Area put into place the first stay-at-home orders in the United States. In the following weeks, counties and states implemented a cascading sequence of stay-at-home orders, bans on public gatherings, shutdowns of nonessential businesses, and face mask mandates. But as small businesses began to face financial insolvency, states and counties began easing these restrictions. To evaluate the effectiveness of policies restricting mobility and business activity, it is important to document the effects of reopening businesses on public ...
Working Paper
Do Stay-at-Home Orders Cause People to Stay at Home? Effects of Stay-at-Home Orders on Consumer Behavior
We link the county-level rollout of stay-at-home orders to anonymized cellphone records and consumer spending data. We document three patterns. First, stay-at-home orders caused people to stay at home: county-level measures of mobility declined by between 9% and 13% by the day after the stay-at-home order went into effect. Second, stay-at-home orders caused large reductions in spending in sectors associated with mobility: restaurants and retail stores. However, food delivery sharply increased after orders went into effect. Third, there is substantial county-level heterogeneity in consumer ...
Working Paper
How do Doctors Respond to Incentives? Unintended Consequences of Paying Doctors to Reduce Costs
Billions of dollars have been spent on pilot programs searching for ways to reduce healthcare costs. I study one such program, where hospitals pay doctors bonuses for reducing the total hospital costs of admitted Medicare patients (a ?bundled payment?). 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 procedure use. These results highlight the ability of doctors to game incentive schemes, ...
Newsletter
The Recent Rise in Health Care Inflation
Health care services inflation was consistently at or above 3% per year in the early 2000s, declined from around 3% at the end of the 2000s to under 1% in 2015, and then rebounded to just under 2% in early 2018. The low point in 2015 was a near-historical low, with health care services price growth bottoming out at a rate not seen since 1961.