Subprime Lending

One of the biggest news stories this year is the collapse of the subprime mortgage lending market. Why did this happen? How much do we really know about subprime lending? A working paper by William Adams, Liran Einav and Jonathan Levin examines the subprime market for automobile loans. The authors find that liquidity constraints are…

Medicare Part D and Switching Costs

It’s decision time for Medicare Part D purchasers. Seniors have until December 31st to make their Part D choice and this decision is not a painless one. The Marketplace Money radio program recently reported (‘Deciphering Part D‘) that “the most popular policies have increased their prices substantially, especially Humana and United Healthcare, the ones that…

Quality Improvement Tools & Techniques

For those of you in the operations research side of the medical care world, you may recognize an interesting textbook by Peter Mears title Quality Improvement Tools and Techniques. The book is a good reference tool, but is a little difficult to slug through. It has so many graphs, outlines, quotations, that there is little…

Maternal Employment and Childhood Obesity

A general result in the obesity literature, is that higher female labor participation rates lead to higher obesity rates in children. For instance, the 1996 Welfare Reform act (PRWORA) increased work requirements for low-income mothers and thus increased labor participation and likely childhood obesity. One question which has not been resolved yet thorough which mechanisms…

Don’t always believe your local economist

The N.Y. Times ran an interesting pair of articles Sunday regarding how economists “got it wrong.” Conflict of Interest Ben Stein (in “The Long and Short of It at Goldman Sachs“) comments on the economic analysis conducted by economist Jan Hatzius of Goldman Sachs. Dr. Hatzuis concludes that the sub-prime mortgage ‘crisis’ will not only…