About
I'm an Economics Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley focusing on public finance topics at the intersection of labor economics and macroeconomics. You can follow me on twitter @omzidar.
Homepage, CV, & Research
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Recent Posts
- Valuing The Vote: Evidence from the Voting Rights Act of 1965
- Great Questions from Paul Krugman
- Do Higher Corporate Taxes Reduce Wages? Micro Evidence from Germany
- Local Economic Development, Agglomeration Economies and the Big Push: 100 Years of Evidence from the Tennessee Valley Authority
- It Takes a Regime Shift: Recent Developments in Japan through the Lens of the Great Depression
- The Miracle of Microfinance? Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation
- Worker Flows Over the Business Cycle: the Role of Firm Quality
- Does Entrepreneurship Pay? The Michael Bloombergs, the Hot Dog Vendors, and the Returns to Self-Employment
Twitter Updates
- RT @MarkThoma: Bernanke: Economic Prospects for the Long Run bit.ly/10a0EZN 4 hours ago
- Valuing The Vote:⁰ Evidence from the Voting Rights Act of 1965 wp.me/p2otxR-m7 7 hours ago
- Great Questions from Paul Krugman wp.me/p2otxR-m4 1 day ago
- RT @bobkocher: The highest price hospital in the US is in…NJ and run by ex-Blackstone guys. Not exactly Hopkins! nytimes.com/2013/05/17/bus… 1 day ago
- nytimes.com/2013/05/17/opi… 1 day ago
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- Economist – Democracy in America
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Tag Archives: Healthcare
Large Variation in Hospital Billing: Three Preliminary Takeaways from New U.S. Data
The NYTimes has an interesting article on variation in hospital billing. In addition to highlighting substantial dispersion for the same procedure even within local areas (e.g. “a hospital in Livingston, N.J., charged $70,712 on average to implant a pacemaker, while … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Baumol's Cost Disease, CMS, Health Expenditures, Healthcare, Regional Variation
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A Century of Progress in Health Technology
From an Ezra Klein healthcare article that you should read.
Regional Variation in Health Insurance Premia, Wages, & Health Costs
While I’m certainly not the first to point these features out, it is astounding to look at how quickly health insurance premia have grown overtime, especially when you compare this growth to that of average wages, total Medicare spending per … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Healthcare, Healthcare Costs, Medicaid, Medicare, Regional Variation in Health Costs, Wages
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The Congress-Does-Nothing Deficit Reduction Plan
This David Kamin article on future tax revenues and bracket creep is worth reading. Here are a couple highlights: Because of some long-standing elements of our system as well as clever provisions in the Affordable Care Act, taxes will actually … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged David Kamin, Healthcare, Obamacare, Richard Rubin, Spending, Tax Expenditure, Tax Reform, Taxes
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Accounting for the Cost of US Healthcare
I read Steven Brill’s healthcare piece recently and wanted to get a better high-level view of where dollars in the healthcare system are spent. I find aggregate data more informative than anecdotes about hospital bill line items (not that I … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Baumol's cost, Baumol's Cost Disease, Healthcare, Healthcare Costs, MGI, Steven Brill
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Do fixed patent terms distort innovation? Evidence from cancer clinical trials
A new paper from Heidi Williams, Eric Budish, and Benjamin N. Roin: ABSTRACT: Patents award innovators a fixed period of market exclusivity, e.g., 20 years in the United States. Yet, since in many industries firms file patents at the time of discovery … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Benjamin N. Roin, Eric Budish, Healthcare, Heidi Williams, Innovation, patents, Productivity
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The Impact of Managed Care Backlash on Health Care Costs
Marginal Revolution sends us to Maxim Pinkovskiy’s JMP: ABSTRACT: During the late 1990s, there was a substantial cultural, media and legal backlash against the cost-containment practices of managed care organizations (particularly, HMOs). Most states passed a variety of laws in … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Costs, Healthcare, Healthcare Costs, HMO, Marginal Revolution, Maxim Pinkovskiy
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The Right Way to Spend on Healthcare
Amitabh Chandra and Jon Skinner have a related paper in JEL: ABSTRACT: In the United States, health care technology has contributed to rising survival rates, yet health care spending relative to GDP has also grown more rapidly than in any … Continue reading
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Tagged Amitabh Chandra, Dartmouth, Healthcare, Jon Skinner, Productivity, Spending
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When more states look like Florida, will we spend too little on Education?
The combination of raising healthcare costs (mostly via Medicaid at the state level), pension obligations, lower employment to population ratios and thus tax revenues, balanced budget requirements, state tax competition, the reluctance to raise taxes in general and mobility concerns … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Aging, Daniel Shoag, Education, Elderly, Healthcare, inequality, Jim Poterba, Josh Rauh, Katherine Baicker, Medicaid, mobility, pensions, Robert Novy-Marx, state tax competition, States, Taxes
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The Medicare Eligibility Age: Demographics and Medical Care Spending
In contrast to Social Security Reform, we do not find a large effect of potential increases in the age of eligibility on the long-term ability to finance medical spending. This is partly because the oldest old spend much more on … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Alan Auerbach, David Culter, Demographics, Fiscal Cliff, Fiscal Policy, Government, Healthcare, inequality, Louise Sheiner, Medicare, Ronald Lee, Spending
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