DARIUS LAKDAWALLA is the Director of Research at the Bing Center for Health Economics, at the RAND Corporation, in Santa Monica, CA. Dr. Lakdawalla received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago and his Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics and Philosophy from Amherst College. He is currently a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, in Cambridge, MA, and is a Professor of Economics at the Pardee RAND Graduate School of Public Policy, where he teaches a course in Microeconomic Theory.
Disability and Long-Term Care
Chronic Disease and Trends in Severe Disability in Working Age Populations (with Jay Bhattacharya and Kavita Choudhry), Medical Care (2008)
Background: Recent work has shown that rates of severe disability, measured by the inability to...
Are The Young Becoming More Disabled? (with Jayanta Bhattacharya and Dana Goldman), Health Affairs (2004)
This paper investigates trends in disability in the U.S. population, particularly among people under age...
Disability Forecasts and Future Medicare Costs (with Jayanta Bhattacharya, David M. Cutler, Dana P. Goldman, Michael D. Hurd, Geoffrey F. Joyce, Constantijn W. A. Panis, and Baoping Shang), Frontiers in Health Policy Research 7 (2004)
The traditional focus of disability research has been on the elderly, with good reason. Chronic...
Forecasting the Nursing Home Population (with Jay Bhattacharya, Dana P. Goldman, Michael Hurd, Geoffrey Joyce, and Constantijn Panis), Medical Care (2003)
Objective. To forecast growth in the US nursing home population, as a function of trends...
Is Nursing Home Demand Affected by the Decline in Age Difference Between Spouses? (with Robert F. Schoeni), Demographic Research (2003)
Education Production
The Economics of Teacher Quality, Journal of Law and Economics (2006)
Concern is often voiced about the quality of American schoolteachers. This paper suggests that, while...
Health Insurance
The Welfare Effects of Public Drug Insurance (with Neeraj Sood), NBER Working Paper (2007)
How Does Health Insurance Affect Workers’ Compensation Filing? (with Robert T. Reville and Seth A. Seabury), Economic Inquiry (2006)
Workers’ compensation provides insurance against job-related injuries, but as many as half of injured workers...
Health Insurance as a Two-Part Pricing Contract (with Neeraj Sood) (2006)
Monopolies appear throughout medical care markets, as a result of patents, limits to the extent...
Does Medicare Benefit the Poor? (with Jay Bhattacharya), Journal of Public Economics (2006)
Measuring the progressivity of age-targeted government programs is difficult because no single data set measures...
Innovation
The Welfare Effects of Public Drug Insurance (with Neeraj Sood), NBER Working Paper (2007)
Intellectual Property and Marketing (with Tomas J. Philipson and Y. Richard Wang), NBER Working Paper 12577 (2006)
Patent protection spurs innovation by raising the rewards for research, but it usually results in...
The Labor Market Value of Health Improvements (with Jay Bhattacharya), Forum for Health Economics & Policy (2006)
HIV Treatment Breakthroughs and Risky Sexual Behavior (with Dana Goldman and Neeraj Sood), Quarterly Journal of Economics (2006)
A Theory of Health Disparities and Medical Technology (with Dana Goldman), Contributions to Economic Analysis & Policy (2005)
Better-educated people are healthier, although the sources of this relationship remain unclear. Starting with basic...
Nonprofit Behavior
The Nonprofit Sector and Industry Performance (with Tomas Philipson), Journal of Public Economics (2006)
Given the importance of nonprofit industries in the economy, little analysis has been conducted as...
Medical Care Output and Productivity in the Nonprofit Sector (with Tomas J. Philipson), Medical Care Output and Productivity (2001)
Obesity and Body Weight
Labor Supply and Weight (with Tomas Philipson), Journal of Human Resources (2007)
We use panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to investigate on-the-job exercise...
Welfare-Enhancing Technological Change and the Growth of Obesity (with Tomas J. Philipson and Jay Bhattacharya), American Economic Review: AEA Papers and Proceedings (2006)
The Health And Cost Consequences Of Obesity Among The Future Elderly (with Dana Goldman and Baoping Shang), Health Affairs (2005)
Obesity could have serious consequences for older cohorts. We used a microsimulation to estimate lifetime...
Other Topics
Time-Inconsistency and Welfare (with Jay Bhattacharya), NBER Working Paper (2004)
Terrorism Risk and Insurance
Optimal Liability for Terrorism (with Eric Talley), NBER Working Paper 12578 (2006)
Insurance, self-protection, and the economics of terrorism (with George Zanjani), Journal of Public Economics (2005)
This paper investigates the rationale for public intervention in the terrorism insurance market. It argues...