Health Care Program meeting.

• Position: Program and Working Group Meeting

The NBER's Program on Health Care met in Cambridge on October 20. David Meltzer, NBER and University of Chicago, organized the program. These papers were discussed:

Amy Finkelstein and Daron Acemoglu, MIT and NBER, "Input and Technology Choices in Regulated Industries: Evidence from the Health Care Sector" (NBER Working Paper No. 12254)

Darius Lakdawala and Neeraj Sood, The RAND Corporation and NBER, "Health Insurance as a Two-Part Pricing Contract" (NBER Working Paper No. 12681)

Dhaval Dave, Bentley College and NBER, and Robert Kaesmer, University of Illinois at Chicago and NBER, "Medicare and Health Behaviors"

Joshua Graff Zivin, Columbia University and NBER; Harsha Thirumurthy, Yale University; and Markus Goldstein, The World Bank, "AIDS Treatment and Intrahousehold Resource Allocations: Children's Nutrition and Schooling in Kenya"

Sean Nicholson, Cornell University and NBER; Michael Waldman, Cornell University; and Nodir Adilov, Purdue University, "Does Television Cause Autism?"

David Meltzer, and Domenico Salvatore, Universita Bocconi, "Sex and Physician Practice Variation"

David M. Cutler and Robert S. Huckman, Harvard University and NBER, and Jonathan T. Kolstad, Harvard University, "Is Entry Efficient When Inputs are Constrained? Lessons from Cardiac Surgery"

Joshua Lerner, Harvard University and NBER, and Ulrike Malmendier, University of California, Berkeley and NBER, "Contractibility and the Design of Research Agreements"

Finkelstein and Acemoglu ask how regulatory change might affect the input mix and technology choices of regulated industries. They present a simple neoclassical framework that emphasizes the change in relative factor prices associated with a shift from full-cost to partial-cost reimbursement, and investigate how this affects firms' technology choices through substitution of (capital embodied) technologies for tasks previously performed by labor. Empirically, they study the change from full-cost to partial-cost reimbursement under the Medicare Prospective Payment System (PPS) reform, which increased the relative price of labor faced by U.S. hospitals. Using the interaction of hospitals' pre-PPS Medicare share of patient days with the introduction of these regulatory changes, they document a substantial increase in capital-labor ratios and a large decline in labor inputs associated with PPS. Most interestingly, they find that the PPS reform seems to have encouraged the adoption of a range of new medical technologies...