"Hospital Productivity and the Misallocation of Healthcare Inputs"

Abstract: There is growing evidence for wide variation in total factor productivity across hospitals, with large differences in risk-adjusted health outcomes as well as expenditures. In this paper, we consider the additional contribution of misallocation in input choices – the underuse of effective inputs and overuse of ineffective ones -- to explain why some hospitals get better outcomes at lower cost. The sample is of 1.7 million patients in the Medicare fee-for-service population with acute myocardial infarction (AMI), or heart attacks, during 2007-17. The problem of confounding health factors is addressed in several ways, including the use of tourists, whose assignment to hospitals resembles random assignment (Doyle, 2011), and ZIP-code fixed effects. Briefly, we find strong evidence for input misallocation across hospitals; greater use of highly effective inputs, such as beta blocker, statin, and ACE/ARB drug treatments, primary care support, and stenting are predictive of highly-productive hospitals, while an excess of multiple physicians, scans, and potentially fraudulent excess home health care billings are predictive of low-productivity hospitals.
Co-Sponsored with the Dept. of Economics 

Improving Emergency first Response and Follow-up for Individuals Who Experience Behavioral Crisis
Abstract: Men and women who experience serious mental illness and other challenges face increased risk of violent encounters with police officers and other first-responders. This talk describes person-, place-, and event-based strategies to improve emergency response to such incidents. It also discusses promising strategies of prevention and follow-up to reduce the risk of such violent encounters from occurring or re-occurring.
Co-sponsored with the California Policy Lab
Location: Presented remotely via Zoom

Aging Among the Homeless in the time of COVID: A crisis upon a crisis
Abstract: In this talk, Margot Kushel will explore the aging of the homeless population, including causes, consequences and solutions. She will end the conversation with implications for the COVID-19 crisis.
Co-sponsored with the California Policy Lab
Location: Presented remotely via Zoom

"The political context and infant health in the United States"
Florencia Torche, Stanford University
Abstract: Political factors could have substantial consequences for the health and wellbeing of populations. In the United States, an important political factor is the party of the president. The two main parties differ in their ideologies and policy agendas, and these differences have sharpened since the 1960s. We examine the effect of prenatal exposure to the political party in office at the national level (president’s party) and the state level (governor’s party) on infant health between 1971 and 2018, considering the heterogeneity and timing of these effects. Fixed effects models show a beneficial effect of a Democratic president but no effect of a Democratic governor on birth outcomes. The benefit of in-utero exposure to a Democratic president is much stronger for Black infants than White infants. The effect of the president’s party does not materialize immediately after the inauguration. Rather, it takes approximately two years to fully emerge, and it remains elevated until the end of the party’s tenure in office. The effect is robust across specifications and only partially mediated by a battery of measurable social policies. Our findings suggest that the party in power is an important determinant of infant health, particularly among vulnerable populations.