VinhHuy Le, Stanford University -- In 2010, the world’s largest tobacco conglomerate descended on an international courtroom ready to fight. Philip Morris International, the company behind cigarette brands like Malboro and Chesterfield, sued the South American country of Uruguay for $25 million. But why pick on a country whose entire GDP at the time was half the size of Philip Morris’ net worth?
Category: Health Economics
COMMENTARY: Bigger Is Not Always Better: The True Impact of Hospital Mergers
Richa Upadhyay, Stanford University -- Most people can name the nation’s most prominent health systems such as Kaiser Permanente, Mayo Clinic, and Trinity Health. Hospital mergers and acquisitions continue to make the “household names” of healthcare stronger, but such consolidation often comes at the expense of consumers. More often than not, hospital acquisitions fail to improve health outcomes while raising costs for patients and payers due to decreased competition.
Labor Market Performance During the COVID-19 Pandemic: State Policy, Compliance, and Social Behavior
Julian W. Klingen, Oberlin College -- The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in late February 2020 in the United States constituted an unprecedented economic shock, in addition to the tragic loss of life, and sparked a rapidly growing literature on the economic implications. Exploiting county-level data in the U.S. from January - August 2020, this paper examines labor market performance in structurally similar counties situated along state borders that were exposed to varying degrees of nonpharmaceutical interventions.
Our Summer 2021 Issue
On behalf of the Comparative Advantage Editorial Board, we are pleased to present the ninth volume, summer issue, of Stanford University's undergraduate economics journal. This volume presents undergraduate work on a wide variety of topics, including environmental economics, political economy, and labor economics. Furthermore, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to exact a toll on individuals… Continue reading Our Summer 2021 Issue
An Update on the Substitution between Alcohol and Marijuana: Evidence from the Legal Drinking Age and Medical Marijuana Laws
Stephen Kisty, University of Pittsburgh -- This paper attempts to update the analysis that utilizes a regression discontinuity design to examine the effect of increased availability of legal alcohol at age 21, caused by the minimum legal drinking age in the United States, on the consumption of marijuana (Crost and Guerrero, 2012).
The Efficacy of State-Level PrEP Access Programs: A Tale of Two States
By Noah Zwiefel, Macalester College -- Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) reinvents what we know about HIV prevention by nearly eliminating the risk that an individual will seroconvert after exposure to HIV. Uptake, however, has been slow in many areas where it would be most beneficial.
Regional Approaches to Combating the United States’ Opioid Epidemic
By Spencer Papay, Columbia University -- This paper investigates the relationship between federally-funded community health centers and opioid overdoses across America’s distinct geographic regions.
The ACA Medicaid Expansion’s Impact on Bankruptcy
By Noah Zwiefel, Macalester College
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This paper explores the relationship between the ACA Medicaid Expansion and the bankruptcy rate in states that did and did not expand their Medicaid programs. In general, past research has found that ...