Tal Gross
Research Associate
Boston University
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We study a 2008 policy reform in which Medicare revised its hospital payment system to better reflect patients' severity of illness. We construct a simulated instrument that predicts a hospital's policy-induced change in reimbursement using pre-reform patients and post-reform rules. The reform led...
Some consumers lack the cash needed to pay for medical care. As a result, they either delay care until they can pay for it or they forgo the care altogether. To test for such a possibility, we study the distribution of monthly Social Security checks among Medicare Part D enrollees. When Social...
December 1, 2019 - Article
Means testing, income limits, higher fees, and more paperwork for bankruptcy filings all contributed to the decline, especially among lower-income households. Responding to a five-fold increase in consumer bankruptcy filings from 0.3 percent of households annually in the early 1980s to 1.5 percent...
Author(s) - Craig Garthwaite, John A. Graves, Tal Gross, Zeynal Karaca, Victoria R. Marone & Matthew J. Notowidigdo
We use comprehensive patient-level discharge data to study the effect of Medicaid on the use of hospital services. Our analysis relies on cross-state variation in the Affordable Care Acts Medicaid expansion, along with within-state variation across ZIP Codes in exposure to the expansion. We find...
A more generous consumer bankruptcy system provides greater insurance against financial risks, but it may also raise the cost of credit to consumers. We study this trade-off using the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA), which raised the costs of filing for...
July 1, 2019 - Article
Over six percent of working age adults in the U.S. receive disability benefits through the Disability Insurance (DI) or Supplemental Security Income (SSI) programs. These programs benefit workers by insuring them against the risk of experiencing a long-term disability and the associated loss of...
We provide the first evidence on the relationship between disability programs and markers of financial distress: bankruptcy, foreclosure, eviction, and home sale. Rates of these adverse financial events peak around the time of disability application and subsequently fall for both allowed and denied...
We present the fi rst estimates of the e ffect of disability programs on markers of financial distress: bankruptcy, foreclosure, and the sale of a home. To estimate the causal eff ect of disability programs on these outcomes, we use an age-based eligibility rule to implement a regression...
This project looks at the effect of SSI on access to and usage of credit. It uses a database that links public bankruptcy records and proprietary credit bureau data with Social Security Administration records. First, we will provide descriptive evidence on the finances of SSI households: whether...
September 1, 2016 - Article
Among call center workers in two Chinese cities, each 10-unit increase in the pollution index reduced worker productivitymeasured by number of calls handledby 0.35 percent. Even in a job where employees only physical exertion involves answering the phone, air pollution takes its toll on productivity...
This paper estimates how the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) varies over the business cycle by exploiting exogenous variation in credit card borrowing limits. Ten years after an individual declares Chapter 7 bankruptcy, the record of the bankruptcy is removed from her credit report, generating...
We investigate the effect of pollution on worker productivity in the service sector by focusing on two call centers in China. Using precise measures of each workers daily output linked to daily measures of pollution and meteorology, we find that higher levels of air pollution decrease worker...
October 5, 2015 - Article
Each newly uninsured person leads to nearly $900 in uncompensated care costs, of which hospitals absorb approximately two thirds as lost profits. When patients can't or won't pay for hospital care, who picks up the tab? During the debate over the Affordable Care Act, many proponents argued that...
American hospitals are required to provide emergency medical care to the uninsured. We use previously confidential hospital financial data to study the resulting uncompensated care, medical care for which no payment is received. We use both panel-data methods and case studies from state-wide...
We study the effect of outdoor air pollution on the productivity of indoor workers at a pear-packing factory. We focus on fine particulate matter (PM2.5), a harmful pollutant that easily penetrates indoor settings. We find that an increase in PM2.5 outdoors leads to a statistically and economically...
October 1, 2013 - Article
There is a powerful work disincentive from public health insurance eligibility....
We study the effect of public health insurance eligibility on labor supply by exploiting the largest public health insurance disenrollment in the history of the United States. In 2005, approximately 170,000 Tennessee residents abruptly lost public health insurance coverage. Using both across- and...
June 1, 2012 - Article
Some households do not have the liquid assets that are needed to cover the costs of bankruptcy filing; receiving tax rebates provided the needed liquidity. Over the past three decades, consumer bankruptcy rates have tripled. As of the late 1990s, nearly 10 percent of American households had declared...
This paper estimates the extent to which legal fees prevent liquidity-constrained households from declaring bankruptcy. To do so, it studies how the 2001 and 2008 tax rebates affected consumer bankruptcy filings. We exploit the randomized timing of the rebate checks and estimate that the rebates...
July 1, 2010 - Article
A 10 percent decrease in the third party coverage rate is associated with a 4 percent decrease in emergency room visits. In...
Substantial uncertainty exists regarding the causal effect of health insurance on the utilization of care. Most studies cannot determine whether the large differences in healthcare utilization between the insured and the uninsured are due to insurance status or to other unobserved differences...
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