This dissertation studies the forces that drive the allocation of patients to hospitals in the United States. Even though it seems there is some market discipline in the hospital industry, we observe that many patients go to hospitals far from the quality frontier and we still do not have a...
The first two chapters of my thesis are related to health economics, and explore how individual decisions affecting health can be impacted by different factors, including by government policy. The third chapter of my thesis (coauthored with Heyu Xiong) focuses on public economics in the Chinese context.
>In the first...
The patent system seeks to strike the ideal balance between competition and the rate of innovation – not to maximize innovation unconditionally. Clearly there must be limits on the manner and degree to which patents are used to diminish competition. A critical complication, however, is that this boundary is often...