AN NBER PUBLICATION
ISSUE: No. 3, September 2018
The Bulletin on Aging & Health
Older households in the U.S. face the risk of catastrophic medical expenditures during retirement. While Medicare covers some hospital expenses starting at age 65, as well as doctor's visits and prescription drugs for beneficiaries who sign up and pay for Part B and Part D coverage, there remain substantial uncovered costs. For example, Medicare does not cover long hospital or nursing home stays and requires copayments for many medical goods and services....
More of the Bulletin on Aging & Health
Article
In the U.S. and other developed countries, life expectancy at birth for women is four to six years longer than the equivalent figure for men. Recent evidence suggests that this has not always been the case, however. When and why did the female ad-vantage in life expectancy arise?
In XX>XY?: The Changing Female Advantage in Life Expectancy, (NBER Working Paper No. 24716), researchers Claudia Goldin and Adriana Lleras-Muney explore this issue.
The...
Article
The use of machine learning (ML) in economics is on the rise, including in the analysis of health care questions. In June, the NBER hosted a conference on Machine Learning in Health Care, organized by David Cutler, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Ziad Obermeyer.
Susan Athey led off the meeting with a discussion of The Impact of Machine Learning in Economics. She offered a "relatively narrow" definition of ML as "a field that develops algorithms designed to be applied to...