Search Results
Journal Article
The Aggregate and Relative Economic Effects of Government Financed Health Care
Government‐financed health care expenditures, through Medicare and Medicaid, have grown from roughly 0% to over 7.6% of national personal income over the past 50 years. This paper investigates the stimulative effects of Medicare spending. Using an annual, state‐level panel, we regress state income growth on own‐state spending and spending in other states, instrumented by unanticipated shocks to aggregate Medicare spending, to estimate local and spillover effects. In our benchmark specification, the own‐spending multiplier equals 1.3 and the spillover multiplier equals 0.4. The total ...
Working Paper
The Aggregate and Relative Economic Effects of Government Financed Health Care
Government-financed health care (GFHC) expenditures, through Medicare and Medicaid, have grown from roughly zero to over 7.6 percent of national personal income over the past 50 years. Recently, some analysts (e.g., the Council of Economics Advisers (2014)) have argued that an expansion of GFHC (in particular Medicaid) has large positive employment effects. Using quarterly data for 1978:Q2-2016:Q4, this paper estimates the impact of GFHC spending on prime-age employment using an instrumental variables strategy that exploits exogenous variation in Medicare spending. Our IV estimate of the ...