Research

This paper identifies a set of possible regulations that could be used both to make the search market more competitive and simultaneously ameliorate the harms flowing from Google’s current monopoly position. The purpose of this paper is to identify conceptual problems and solutions based on sound economic principles and to begin a discussion from which robust and specific policy recommendations can be drafted.

Enthusiasm for “greening the financial system” is welcome, but a fundamental challenge remains: financial decision makers lack the necessary information. It is not enough to know that climate change is bad. Markets need credible, digestible information on how climate change translates into material risks. To bridge the gap between climate science and real-world financial indicators, we simulate the effect of climate change on sovereign credit ratings for 109 countries, creating the world’s first climate-adjusted sovereign credit rating. Under various warming scenarios, we find evidence of climate-induced sovereign downgrades as early as 2030, increasing in intensity and across more countries over the century. We find strong evidence that stringent climate policy consistent with limiting warming to below 2 °C, honoring the Paris Climate Agreement and following representative concentration pathway (RCP) 2.6, could nearly eliminate the effect of climate change on ratings. In contrast, under higher emissions scenarios (i.e., RCP 8.5), 59 sovereigns experience climate-induced downgrades by 2030, with an average reduction of 0.68 notches, rising to 81 sovereigns facing an average downgrade of 2.18 notches by 2100. We calculate the effect of climate-induced sovereign downgrades on the cost of corporate and sovereign debt. Across the sample, climate change could increase the annual interest payments on sovereign debt by US$45–$67 billion under RCP 2.6, rising to US$135–$203 billion under RCP 8.5. The additional cost to corporations is US$10–$17 billion under RCP 2.6 and US$35–$61 billion under RCP 8.5.

Importance  There is evidence that Republican-leaning counties have had higher COVID-19 death rates than Democratic-leaning counties and similar evidence of an association between political party affiliation and attitudes regarding COVID-19 vaccination; further data on these rates may be useful.

Objective  To assess political party affiliation and mortality rates for individuals during the initial 22 months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Design, Setting, and Participants  A cross-sectional comparison of excess mortality between registered Republican and Democratic voters between March 2020 and December 2021 adjusted for age and state of voter registration was conducted. Voter and mortality data from Florida and Ohio in 2017 linked to mortality records for January 1, 2018, to December 31, 2021, were used in data analysis.

Exposures  Political party affiliation.

Main Outcomes and Measures  Excess weekly deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic adjusted for age, county, party affiliation, and seasonality.

Results  Between January 1, 2018, and December 31, 2021, there were 538 159 individuals in Ohio and Florida who died at age 25 years or older in the study sample. The median age at death was 78 years (IQR, 71-89 years). Overall, the excess death rate for Republican voters was 2.8 percentage points, or 15%, higher than the excess death rate for Democratic voters (95% prediction interval [PI], 1.6-3.7 percentage points). After May 1, 2021, when vaccines were available to all adults, the excess death rate gap between Republican and Democratic voters widened from −0.9 percentage point (95% PI, −2.5 to 0.3 percentage points) to 7.7 percentage points (95% PI, 6.0-9.3 percentage points) in the adjusted analysis; the excess death rate among Republican voters was 43% higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters. The gap in excess death rates between Republican and Democratic voters was larger in counties with lower vaccination rates and was primarily noted in voters residing in Ohio.

Conclusions and Relevance  In this cross-sectional study, an association was observed between political party affiliation and excess deaths in Ohio and Florida after COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults. These findings suggest that differences in vaccination attitudes and reported uptake between Republican and Democratic voters may have been factors in the severity and trajectory of the pandemic in the US.

Exploiting the random assignment of Medicaid beneficiaries to managed care plans, we find substantial plan-specific spending effects despite plans having identical cost sharing. Enrollment in the lowest-spending plan reduces spending by at least 25 percent—primarily through quantity reductions—relative to enrollment in the highest-spending plan. Rather than reducing "wasteful" spending, lower-spending plans broadly reduce medical service provision—including the provision of low-cost, high-value care—and worsen beneficiary satisfaction and health. Consumer demand follows spending: a 10 percent increase in plan-specific spending is associated with a 40 percent increase in market share. These facts have implications for the government's contracting problem and program cost growth.

Review of the Expert and Academic Literature Assessing Impact of Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015

Pareto Efficiency is a core assumption of most models of household decision-making. We test this assumption using a new dataset covering the retirement saving contributions of over a million U.S. individuals. While a vast literature has failed to reject household efficiency in developed countries, we find evidence of widespread inefficiency in our setting: retirement contributions are not allocated to the account of the spouse with the highest employer match rate. This lack of coordination cannot be explained by inertia, auto-enrollment, or simple heuristics. Instead, we find that indicators of weaker marital commitment correlate with the incidence of inefficient allocations.

In "continuous choice" settings, consumers decide not only on whether to purchase a product, but also on how much to purchase. As a result, firms should optimize a full price schedule rather than a single price point. This paper provides a methodology to empirically estimate the optimal schedule under multi-dimensional consumer heterogeneity. We apply our method to novel data from an educational-services firm that contains purchase-size information not only for deals that materialized, but also for potential deals that eventually failed. We show that the optimal second-degree price discrimination (i.e., optimal nonlinear tariff) improves the firm's profit upon linear pricing by about 7.9%. That said, this second-degree price discrimination scheme only recovers 7.4% of the gap between the profitability of linear pricing (i.e., no price discrimination) and that of infeasible first degree price discrimination. We also conduct several further counterfactual analyses (i) comparing the role of demand- v.s. cost-side factors in shaping the optimal price schedule, (ii) examining third-degree price discrimination, and (iii) empirically quantifying the magnitude by which incentive-compatibility constraints impact the optimal pricing and profits.