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Showing results 1 to 10 of approximately 45.
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Working Paper
Physician Payments Under Health Care Reform
This study assesses the impact of major health insurance reform in Massachusetts on the prices of services paid to physicians in the privately insured market. We estimate that the reform caused physician payments to increase at least 10.8 percentage points. This impact occurred while the legislation was materializing but before the final compromised version of the reform was enacted in April 2006. This finding is consistent with prices being set in a forward-looking manner, in anticipation of the reform. Overall, one-sixth of physician service price growth in Massachusetts between 2003 and ...
Foreclosures, house-price changes, and subprime mortgages in Massachusetts cities and towns
This module shows: The changing patterns in foreclosure rates and subprime mortgage originations across Massachusetts cities and towns over time; How movements in these rates compare with movements in house prices for any user-selected city or town; The association between foreclosure rates and median income in these cities and towns.
Working Paper
Measuring News Sentiment
This paper demonstrates state-of-the-art text sentiment analysis tools while developing a new time-series measure of economic sentiment derived from economic and financial newspaper articles from January 1980 to April 2015. We compare the predictive accuracy of a large set of sentiment analysis models using a sample of articles that have been rated by humans on a positivity/negativity scale. The results highlight the gains from combining existing lexicons and from accounting for negation. We also generate our own sentiment-scoring model, which includes a new lexicon built specifically to ...
Journal Article
What's Down with Inflation?
After eight years of economic recovery, inflation remains below the FOMC?s target. Dissecting the underlying price data by spending category reveals that low inflation largely reflects prices that are relatively insensitive to overall economic conditions. Notably, modest increases in health-care prices, which have been held down by mandated cuts to the growth of Medicare payments, have helped moderate overall inflation. Further slow growth in health-care prices is likely to remain a drag on inflation.
Report
The impact of competition on technology adoption: an apples-to-PCs analysis
We study the effect of market structure on a personal computer manufacturer?s decision to adopt new technology. This industry is unusual because there exist two horizontally segmented retail markets with different degrees of competition: the IBM-compatible (or PC) platform and the Apple platform. We first document that, relative to Apple, producers of PCs typically have more frequent technology adoption, shorter product cycles, and steeper price declines over the product cycle. We then develop a parsimonious vintage-capital model that matches the prices and sales of PC and Apple products. The ...
Journal Article
Will Rising Rents Push Up Future Inflation?
Rising rents account for a significant portion of recent inflation. Estimates of how rent inflation typically responds to two leading indicators—current asking rents and current house prices—can help forecast the path of overall inflation for the next two years. This method predicts that higher rent inflation could add about 0.5 percentage point to personal consumption expenditures price inflation for both 2022 and 2023. These potential additions are important in light of the Federal Reserve’s 2% inflation target.
Working Paper
Decomposing Supply and Demand Driven Inflation
The extent to which either supply or demand factors drive inflation has important implications for economic policy. I propose a framework to decompose inflation into supply- and demand-driven components. I generate two new data series, the supply and demand-driven contributions to personal consumption expenditures (PCE) inflation, which quantify the degree to which either demand or supply is driving inflation in a current month. The series show expected time-series patterns. The demand-driven contribution tends to decline during recessions, while the supply-driven contribution tends to follow ...
Working Paper
The effects of competition on price dispersion in the airline industry: a panel analysis
This paper analyzes the effects of market structure on price dispersion in the airline industry, using panel data from 1993 through 2006. The results found in this paper contrast with those of Borenstein and Rose (1994), who found that price dispersion increases with competition. We find that competition has a negative effect on price dispersion, in line with the textbook treatment of price discrimination. Specifically, the effects of competition on price dispersion are most significant on routes that we identify as having consumers characterized by relatively heterogeneous elasticities of ...
Working Paper
A Simple Framework to Monitor Inflation
This paper proposes a simple framework to help monitor and understand movements in PCE inflation in real time. The approach is to decompose inflation using simple categorical-level regressions or systems of equations. The estimates are then used to group categories into components of PCE inflation. I review some applications of the methodology, and show how it can help explain inflation dynamics over recent episodes. The methodology shows that inflation remained low in the mid-2010s primarily because of factors unrelated to aggregate economic conditions. I also apply the methodology to ...
Working Paper
A Denial a Day Keeps the Doctor Away
Who bears the consequences of administrative problems in healthcare? We use data on repeated interactions between a large sample of U.S. physicians and many different insurers to document the complexity of healthcare billing, and estimate its economic costs for doctors and consequences for patients. Observing the back-and-forth sequences of claim denials and resubmissions for past visits, we can estimate physicians’ costs of haggling with insurers to collect payments. Combining these costs with the revenue never collected, we estimate that physicians lose 18% of Medicaid revenue to billing ...