Patient Cost-Sharing and Healthcare Spending Growth, by Katharine Baicker and Dana Goldman (JEP, ungated)
Reforming Payments to Healthcare Providers: The Key to Slowing Healthcare Cost Growth While Improving Quality? by Mark McClellan (JEP, ungated)
Evaluating the Medical Malpractice System and Options for Reform, by Daniel P. Kessler (JEP, ungated)
Quantile regression analysis of body mass and wages, by Meliyanni Johar and Hajime Katayama (Health Economics)
Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, we explore the relationship between body mass and wages. We use quantile regression to provide a broad description of the relationship across the wage distribution. We also allow the relationship to vary by the degree of social skills involved in different jobs. Our results find that for female workers body mass and wages are negatively correlated at all points in their wage distribution. The strength of the relationship is larger at higher-wage levels. For male workers, the relationship is relatively constant across wage distribution but heterogeneous across ethnic groups. When controlling for the endogeneity of body mass, we find that additional body mass has a negative causal impact on the wages of white females earning more than the median wages and of white males around the median wages. Among these workers, the wage penalties are larger for those employed in jobs that require extensive social skills. These findings may suggest that labor markets reward white workers for good physical shape differently, depending on the level of wages and the type of job a worker has.
The $640 Billion Question — Why Does Cost-Effective Care Diffuse So Slowly?, by Victor R. Fuchs and Arnold Milstein (NEJM)
Hard Choices — Alternatives for Reining In Medicare and Medicaid Spending, by Meredith B. Rosenthal (NEJM)
