National Bureau of Economic Research
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China's Expansion of Drug Insurance Increased Access While Containing Costs
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China's National Reimbursement Drug List (NRDL) reform, which affected over 1 billion people, was one of the world's largest pharmaceutical insurance policy experiments. Prior to 2016, China's universal health insurance excluded innovative drugs, forcing patients to pay high out-of-pocket prices for some life-saving treatments. The reform expanded access to these drugs and also negotiated prices centrally.
In A Double Dose of Reform: Insurance and Centralized Negotiation in Drug Markets (NBER Working Paper 33832), Panle Jia Barwick, Ashley T. Swanson, and Tianli Xia examine the economic and welfare…
From the NBER Reporter: Research, program, and conference summaries
The Economics of Counterfeiting
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Intellectual property (IP) rights and counterfeiting have permeated everyday lives as globalization, technological advancement, and AI flourish. Interbrand estimates that the brand value of Louis Vuitton was $26.3 billion in 2023, as an example of the IP value of brands. The values brands possess generate incentives for counterfeiting and imitation. Counterfeiting cuts across countries and industries. Notably, counterfeit footwear has topped the seizure list of the US customs service for four years, accounting for nearly 40 percent of total seizures.1 The origins, impacts, and remedies of counterfeits and the protection of IP are pertinent topics to ...
From the NBER Bulletin on Health
Addressing Common Misconceptions About the Child Mental Health Crisis
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The US Surgeon General has called the child mental health crisis “the defining public health crisis of our time.” In 2020, 13 percent of US children aged 3 to 17 had a diagnosed mental or behavioral condition. In 2021, mental health services for children cost $31 billion—47 percent of pediatric medical spending. Childhood mental health issues are linked to lower educational attainment, reduced employment, and increased use of welfare programs. Also, youth suicide rates are especially high in the US; males aged 15 to 19 have a rate four times higher than in France. In Investing in Children to Address the Child Mental Health Crisis (NBER Working Paper 33632), Janet Currie explores three common misconceptions about this youth mental health...
From the NBER Bulletin on Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship as an Alternative to Flexibility at Work
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The surge in remote work in recent years has transformed labor markets, with potentially important implications for the interaction between workplace flexibility and entrepreneurship. In Hustling from Home? Work from Home Flexibility and Entrepreneurial Entry (NBER Working Paper 33237), John M. Barrios, Yael Hochberg, and Hanyi (Livia) Yi explore whether the increased flexibility provided by work-from-home (WFH) arrangements has affected entrepreneurial decisions. They focus on the COVID-19 pandemic as a natural experiment and analyze how the sudden shift to remote work affected new business creation. Guided…
Featured Working Papers
Data on US Civil War military justice trials suggest that Black soldiers faced significant bias in group violence cases and mutiny charges, but Dora Costa and Ziqi Zhao also find that the court-martial system showed fairness overall compared to modern courts, with only a 4 percentage point racial gap in acquittal rates.
US hospital data for the 1966–2022 period shows that hospital mergers on average lead to a 7 percent price increase and 4 percent decrease in patient volume, while reducing wages by about 3 percent and employment by between 9 and 13 percent, according to Bradley Setzler.
Yoosoon Chang, Steven N. Durlauf, Bo Hu, and Joon Park find that parental income and family structure during middle childhood and adolescence have stronger effects on children’s economic outcomes as adults than these factors at younger ages.
In a study using data from Chicago and Seattle, Felipe M. Gonçalves, Steven Mello, and Emily K. Weisburst find that Black civilians comprise about 49 percent of potential arrestees—those who meet the legal standard of probable cause—but represent 56 percent of arrests.
Following US implementation of tariffs in 2018, the share of central banks’ holdings of the US dollar fell by 2.1 percent and other asset shares rose by 0.8 percent, according to Menzie D. Chinn, Jeffrey A. Frankel, and Hiro Ito.
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