Search Results
Journal Article
Assessing Layoffs in Four Midwestern States during the Pandemic Recession
We use WARN data to assess layoffs in four Midwestern states during the current pandemic-induced recession—Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. The data come from the advance layoff notices filed under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act. We find that the number of workers affected by layoff announcements rose sharply in the second half of March and April, and unexpected changes in economic conditions meant that workers received little advance notice before layoff. Layoff announcements have affected workers across these four states, and workers in mining ...
Journal Article
Drug prices under the medicare drug discount card program
In early 2004, the U.S. government initiated the Medicare Drug Discount Card Program (MDDCP), which allowed card subscribers to obtain discounts on prescription drugs. Pharmacy-level prices were posted on the program website weekly with the hope or promoting competition among card sponsors by facilitating consumer access to prices. A large panel of pharmacy-level price data collected from this website indicates that price dispersion across cards persisted throughout the program. Prices declined initially when consumers were choosing cards, but rose later when subscribers were restricted to ...
Working Paper
What do happiness and health satisfaction data tell us about relative risk aversion?
In this paper we provide estimates of the coefficient of relative risk aversion using information on self-reports of subjective personal well-being from the 2006 Gallup World Poll. We expand the existing literature on the use of happiness data to analyze economic issues by considering the implications of allowing for health state dependence in the utility function. Our estimates of relative risk aversion using pooled data from various country groupings are smaller than one, suggesting less concavity than log utility. We also find that controlling for health dependence generally reduces these ...
Journal Article
Employment growth slows in the Eighth District
Journal Article
Entrepreneurship
Journal Article
Innovation: Is the Eighth District catching up with the nation?
The degree of innovation in the Eighth District has lagged the rest of the nation over the past two decades. In one area, however, the District is beginning to catch up.
Working Paper
Information and drug prices: evidence from the Medicare discount drug card program
In early 2004, the U.S. Government initiated the Medicare Discount Drug Card Program (MDDCP), which created a market for drug cards that allowed elderly and handicapped subscribers to obtain discounts on their prescription drug purchases. Pharmacy-level prices for many drugs were posted on the program website weekly from May 29, 2004 to December 31, 2005, as the largest undertaking in the history of government-sponsored information release began with the hope of promoting competition by facilitating access to prices. A large panel of pharmacy-level drug price data collected from the Medicare ...
Journal Article
Employment growth mixed across Eighth District
Working Paper
Patent licensing revisited: heterogeneous firms and product differentiation
In this paper we study the optimal licensing agreement between a patentholder of a cost-reducing innovation and firms that have heterogeneous uses for the new technology. We consider the case in which these firms are competitors in a downstream market. We extend the competition environment among the licensees beyond the Cournot/Bertrand models considered by the previous literature to a framework with differentiated products. We also assume that potential licensees have private information about the usefulness of the new technology. We characterize two purposes the optimal licensing contract ...