Best Selling Books by Jonathan Gruber

Chapters include: "Income distribution and welfare programs", "State and local government expenditures" and "Health economics and private health insurance".

We are currently engaged in the most fundamental debate about the role of government in decades, and who better than Jonathan Gruber to guide students through the particulars in the new edition of his best-selling text, Public Finance and Public Policy, 6e. The new edition details ongoing policy debates, with special focus on the largest tax reform in 30 years. New topics include universal basic income, the legalisation of weed, and congestion pricing. And, of course, there is an extensive, in-depth discussion of the debate over health care At the heart of this new edition is the author’s belief that at no other time has it been so important to know the facts, to distinguish facts from falsehoods, and to be thinking clearly about problem, policy, and politics. The sixth edition delivers on all counts.

The untold story of how America once created the most successful economy the world has ever seen—and how we can do it again. The American economy glitters on the outside, but the reality is quite different. Job opportunities and economic growth are increasingly concentrated in a few crowded coastal enclaves. Corporations and investors are disproportionately developing technologies that benefit the wealthiest Americans in the most prosperous areas -- and destroying middle class jobs elsewhere. To turn this tide, we must look to a brilliant and all-but-forgotten American success story and embark on a plan that will create the industries of the future -- and the jobs that go with them. Beginning in 1940, massive public investment generated breakthroughs in science and technology that first helped win WWII and then created the most successful economy the world has ever seen. Private enterprise then built on these breakthroughs to create new industries -- such as radar, jet engines, digital computers, mobile telecommunications, life-saving medicines, and the internet-- that became the catalyst for broader economic growth that generated millions of good jobs. We lifted almost all boats, not just the yachts. Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson tell the story of this first American growth engine and provide the blueprint for a second. It''s a visionary, pragmatic, sure-to-be controversial plan that will lead to job growth and a new American economy in places now left behind.

"A graphic explanation of the PPACA act"--Provided by publisher.

We are currently engaged in the most fundamental debate about the role of government in decades, and who better than Jonathan Gruber to guide students through the particulars in the new edition of his best-selling text, Public Finance and Public Policy, 6e. The new edition details ongoing policy debates, with special focus on the largest tax reform in 30 years. New topics include universal basic income, the legalization of pot, and congestion pricing. And, of course, there is an extensive, in-depth discussion of the debate over health care. At the heart of this new edition is the author’s belief that at no other time has it been so important to know the facts, to distinguish facts from falsehoods, and to be thinking clearly about problem, policy, and politics. The sixth edition delivers on all counts.

A critical question for Social Security policy is how program incentives affect retirement behavior. We use the wealth of new data available through the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) to examine the impact of Social Security incentives on male retirement. We implement forward-looking models of retirement whereby individuals consider not just the incentives to work in the next year but in all future years as well. We find that such forward looking incentive measures for Social Security are significant determinants of retirement decisions. Our findings suggest that Social Security policies which increase the incentives to work at older ages can significantly reduce the exit rate of older workers from the labor force.

To low income women and children, has expanded dramatically over the past decade. This expansion provides a `natural laboratory'' for learning about the effect of public health insurance eligibility on insurance coverage, health utilization, and health outcomes. This paper provides an overview of what has been learned about these questions from studying the expansions. Medicaid eligibility rose steeply over the 1984-1992 period, but coverage rose much less sharply, due to limited takeup of benefits. This is partly due to the fact that many eligibles already had private insurance coverage, and evidence suggests that a large share of new enrollees dropped their private coverage to join the program. Nevertheless, utilization of preventive care rose substantially as a result of the expansions, and there were significant improvements in health outcomes, specifically infant and child mortality. While these mortality reductions came at significant cost to the Medicaid program, the cost per life saved was low relative to alternative uses of government funds. These findings highlight both the potential benefits of public insurance policy and the importance of appropriately targeting scarce public health dollars.

Drawing on research from both the original RAND Health Insurance Experiment and her own research, the author presents compelling evidence that health insurance does indeed affect medical spending and encourages policy solutions that acknowledge and account for this.

One popular option for health care reform in the U.S. is to make particular groups, such as children, eligible for public health insurance coverage. A key question in assessing the cost of this option is the extent to which public eligibility will crowd out the private insurance coverage of these groups. We estimate the extent of crowdout arising from the dramatic expansions of the Medicaid program during the 1987-1992 period. Over this time period, Medicaid eligibility for children increased by 50 percent and eligibility for pregnant women doubled. We estimate that between 50 percent and 75 percent of the increase in Medicaid coverage was associated with a reduction in private insurance coverage. This occurred largely because employees took up employer-based insurance less frequently, although employers may have encouraged them to do so by contributing less for insurance. There is some evidence that workers dropped coverage for their family and switched into individual policies.

Recent theoretical work suggests that means and asset-tested social insurance programs can explain the low savings of lower income households in the U.S. We assess the validity of this hypothesis by investigating the effect of Medicaid, the health insurance program for low income women and children, on savings behavior. We do so using data on asset holdings from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, and on consumption from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, matched to information on the eligibility of each household for Medicaid. Exogenous variation in Medicaid eligibility is provided by the dramatic expansion of this program over the 1984-1993 period. We document that Medicaid eligibility has a sizeable and significant negative effect on wealth holdings; we estimate that in 1993 the Medicaid program lowered wealth holdings by 17.7% among the eligible population. We confirm this finding by showing a strong positive association between Medicaid eligibility and consumption expenditures; in 1993, the program raised consumption expenditures among eligibles by 5.2%. We also exploit the fact that asset testing was phased out by the Medicaid program over this period to document that these Medicaid effects are much stronger in the presence of an asset test, confirming the importance of asset testing for household savings decisions.

One of the benefits commonly claimed for expanded public health insurance is improved efficiency of medical care delivery, but this claim has little rigorous empirical support. We provide such support by assessing the impact of the Medicaid expansions over the 1983-1996 period on the incidence of avoidable hospitalizations. We find that expanded public insurance eligibility leads to a significant decline in avoidable hospitalization: over this period Medicaid eligibility expansions were associated with a 22% decline in avoidable hospitalization. But we also find that there is a countervailing and larger impact in terms of increased access to hospital care for newly eligible children, so that there is an overall 10% rise in child hospitalizations due to the expansions. The expansions have mixed implications for treatment intensity, but appear to be associated with a significant shift in the types of hospitals at which children are treated, with fewer children treated in public hospitals and more in for-profit facilities.

One of the most sizable and least predictable shocks to economic opportunities in developing countries is major illness, both in terms of medical care expenditures and lost income from reduced labor supply and productivity. As a result, families may not be able to smooth their consumption over periods of illness. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which families are able to insure consumption against major illness using a unique panel data set from Indonesia that combines excellent measures of health status with consumption information. We focus on the effect of large exogenous changes in physical functioning. We find that there are significant economic costs associated with these illnesses, albeit more from income loss than from medical expenditures. We also find a robust and striking rejection of full consumption insurance. Indeed, the deviation from full consumption smoothing is significant, particularly for illnesses that severely limit physical function; families are able to smooth less than 30 percent of the income loss from these illnesses. These estimates suggest large welfare gains from the introduction of formal disability insurance, and that the large public subsidies for medical care typical of most developing countries may improve welfare by providing consumption insurance.

We investigate the impact of tax subsidies on the firms decision to offer insurance, and on conditional firm spending on insurance. We do so using the micro-data underlying the Employee Compensation Index, which has a major advantage for this exercise: the matching of very high quality compensation data with information on a sample of workers in the firm. We find that, overall, there is a modest elasticity of insurance offering with respect to after-tax prices (elasticity of -0.31 to -0.41), but a larger elasticity of insurance spending (elasticity of 0.66 to 0.99). We also find that the elasticity of offering is driven solely by small firms, for whom the elasticity is much larger, but that spending is more elastic in large firms. We provide some evidence on how the aggregation of worker preferences determines benefits provision decisions. In particular, we find evidence to support a median voter model of benefits determination, along with some additional influence for the most highly compensated workers in the firm. Our simulation results suggest that major tax reform could lead to an enormous reduction in employer-provided health insurance spending.

We investigate the hypothesis that increasing access for the indigent to physician offices shifts care from hospital outpatient settings and lowers Medicaid costs (the so-called offset effect''). To evaluate this hypothesis we exploit a large increase in physician fees in the Tennessee Medicaid program, using Georgia as a control. We find that beneficiaries shifted care from clinics to offices, but that there was little or no shifting from hospital outpatient departments or emergency rooms. Thus, we find no offset effect in outpatient expenditures. Inpatient admissions and expenditures fell, reducing overall program spending eight percent. Because the inpatient reduction did not occur in ambulatory-care-sensitive diagnoses, however, we cannot demonstrate a causal relationship with the fee change.

After steadily declining over the previous 15 years, youth smoking began to rise precipitously in 1992, and by 1997 had risen by roughly one-third from its 1991 trough. We know very little about what caused this time trend and what public policy can do to reverse it. This paper therefore provides a comprehensive analysis of the impact of prices and other public policies on youth smoking in the 1990s, drawing on three separate data sets. I find that the most important policy determinant of youth smoking, particularly among older teens, is prices. Prices are a significant and sizeable determinant of smoking by older teens in all tree data sets, although the estimated price elasticity varies significantly. On the other hand, price does not appear to be an important determinant of smoking by younger teens. There is little consistent evidence of robust effect of other public policies targeted to reducing youth smoking, although there is some suggestion that restrictions on youth purchase of cigarettes reduce the quantity of cigarettes reduce the quantity of cigarettes smoked. And I find that black youth and those with less educated parents are much more responsive to cigarette price than are white teens and those with more educated parents, suggesting a strong correlation between price sensitivity and socioeconomic status.

We estimate the impact of changes in abortion access in the early 1970s on the average living standards of cohorts born in those years. In particular, we address the selection inherent in the abortion decision: is the marginal child who is not born when abortion access increases more or less disadvantaged than the average child? Legalization of abortion in five states around 1970, followed by legalization nationwide due to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, generates natural variation which can be used to estimate the effect of abortion access. We find that cohorts born after abortion was legalized experienced a significant reduction in a number of adverse outcomes. Our estimates imply that the marginal child who was not born due to legalization would have been 70% more likely to live in a single parent family, 40% more likely to live in poverty, 50% more likely to receive welfare, and 35% more likely to die as an infant. These selection effects imply that the legalization of abortion saved the government over $14 billion in welfare expenditures through 1994.

Religion plays an important role in the lives of many Americans, but there is relatively little study by economists of the implications of religiosity for economic outcomes. This likely reflects the enormous difficulty inherent in separating the causal effects of religiosity from other factors that are correlated with outcomes. In this paper, I propose a potential solution to this long standing problem, by noting that a major determinant of religious participation is religious market density, or the share of the population in an area which is of an individual''s religion. I make use of the fact that exogenous predictions of market density can be formed based on area ancestral mix. That is, I relate religious participation and economic outcomes to the correlation of the religious preference of one''s own heritage with the religious preference of other heritages that share one''s area. I use the General Social Survey (GSS) to model the impact of market density on church attendance, and micro-data from the 1990 Census to model the impact on economic outcomes. I find that a higher market density leads to a significantly increased level of religious participation, and as well to better outcomes according to several key economic indicators: higher levels of education and income, lower levels of welfare receipt and disability, higher levels of marriage, and lower levels of divorce.

The link between health insurance and the workplace in the U.S. has led to concern over the possibility of insurance-induced reductions in job mobility or ''job-lock". Designing health insurance reforms which retain employer-based insurance coverage but mitigate the extent of job-lock requires an understanding of the policy dimensions to which job-lock is most receptive. We study a policy of limited insurance portability which has been adopted by a number of states and the federal government over the last 20 years. These "continuation of coverage'' mandates grant individuals the right to continue purchasing health insurance through their former employers for some period of time after leaving their jobs. We find that the passage of these mandates caused a significant increase in the job mobility of prime age male workers. This suggests that a sizeable share of job-lock arises from short run concerns over portability rather than from long run problems

The Tax Reform Act of 1986 introduced a new tax subsidy for health insurance purchases by self-employed persons. This paper analyzes the changing patterns of insurance demand before and after this reform to generate new estimates of how the after tax price of insurance affects the discrete choice of whether to buy insurance. We employ both traditional regression models for insurance demand, in which after-tax price of insurance is an explanatory variable. as well as nonparametric tests that compare changes in insurance purchases by self-employed individuals with the coincident changes for other groups. Our analysis suggests that I one percent increase in the cost of insurance coverage reduces the probability that a self-employed household will be insured by as much as 1.8 percentage points.

We investigate the effect of health insurance coverage on the decision of individuals to apply for Disability Insurance (DI). Those who qualify for DI receive public insurance under Medicare, but only after a two-year waiting period. This raises concerns that many disabled are going uninsured while they wait for their Medicare coverage. Moreover, the combination of this waiting period and the uncertainty about application acceptance may deter those with health insurance on their jobs, but no alternative source of coverage, from leaving work to apply for DI. Data from the Health and Retirement Survey show that, in fact, uninsurance does not rise during the waiting period for DI benefits; reductions in own employer coverage are small, and are offset by increases in other sources of insurance. Correspondingly, we find that imperfect insurance coverage does deter DI application. Those who have an alternative source of insurance coverage (coverage from a spouse''s employer or retiree coverage), are 26 to 74% more likely to apply for DI than those without such an alternative. Thus, limiting this waiting period would not increase the insurance coverage of the disabled in the U.S., but it would significantly increase applications to the DI program.

Low rates of health insurance coverage among the non-employed have motivated consideration of policies to subsidize the purchase of insurance for those who are without a job. But there is little evidence on the extent to which coverage differentials between the employed and the non-employed reflect the effects of job loss or merely different underlying tastes for insurance. If the latter, subsidies may not be successful in increasing the rate of insurance coverage among the non-employed. Furthermore, subsidies which lower the costs of non-employment may increase both the incidence and duration of joblessness. We provide new evidence on these issues by analyzing longitudinal data on 25-54 year-old men over the 1983-1989 period. We have four findings of interest. First, even after modelling differences in underlying tastes for insurance, the likelihood of insurance coverage drops by roughly 20 percentage points following job separation. Second, limited subsidization of the cost of insurance through state laws mandating continued access to employer-provided health insurance for the non-employed increases the likelihood of having insurance while without a job by 6.7 percent. Third, these mandates also increase the number of individuals with spells of non-employment and the total amount of time spent jobless. Finally, at least some of this increased non-employment appears to be spent in productive job search as the availability of continuation coverage is related to significant wage gains among those who separate from their jobs.

The poor health status of children in the U.S. relative to other industrialized nations has motivated recent efforts to extend insurance coverage to underprivileged children. There is little past evidence that extending eligibility for public insurance to previously ineligible groups will increase health status or even utilization of medical resources. Using data from the Current Population Survey, the National Health Interview Survey, and state-level data on child mortality, we examine the utilization and health effects of eligibility for public insurance. Our models are identified by the recent expansions of the Medicaid program to low income children. We find that these expansions roughly doubled the fraction of children eligible for Medicaid between 1984 and 1992; by 1992, almost 1/3 of all children were eligible. But takeup of these expansions was much less than full even among otherwise uninsured children. Despite this takeup problem, we find that eligibility for Medicaid significantly increased the utilization of medical care along a number of dimensions. Medicaid eligibility was associated with large increases in care delivered in physician''s offices, although there was some increase in care in hospital settings as well. While there was no effect of eligibility on parentally-assessed subjective health measures, we do find notable reductions in child mortality. Finally, we find that rising Medicaid eligibility is associated with reductions in racial disparities in the number of visits and in child disparities in the site at which care is delivered.

A key question for health care reform in the U.S. is whether expanded health insurance eligibility will lead to improvements in health outcomes. We address this question in the context of dramatic expansions in the Medicaid eligibility for pregnant women that took place during the 1980s. We build a detailed simulation model of each state''s Medicaid policy during the 1979-1990 period, and use this model to estimate 1) the effect of changes in the rules on the eligibility of pregnant women for Medicaid, and 2) the effect of Medicaid eligibility changes on birth outcomes in aggregate Vital Statistics data. We have three main findings. First, the expansions did dramatically increase the Medicaid eligibility of pregnant women, but did so at quite differential rates across the states. Second, the expansions lowered the incidence of infant mortality and low birthweight; we estimate that the 20 percentage point increase in eligibility among 15-44 year old women was associated with a decrease in infant mortality of 7%. Third, earlier, targeted changes in Medicaid eligibility, such as through relaxations of the family structure requirements from the AFDC program, had much larger effects on birth outcomes than broader expansions of eligibility to all women with somewhat higher income levels. We suggest that the source of this difference was the much lower takeup of Medicaid coverage by individuals who became eligible under the broader expansions. We find that the targeted expansions, which raised Medicaid expenditures by $1.7 million per infant life saved, were in line with conventional.

Although the vast majority of working individuals aged 55-64 receive health insurance coverage through their employment, many of these individuals face the prospect of losing such coverage should they retire before becoming eligible for guaranteed public coverage through Medicare at age 65. Because the expected medical expenses of this group are large and uncertain, the availability of health insurance coverage after retirement could be a key factor in the retirement decision of older workers. We examine the effect of health insurance on retirement by looking at variation in state and federal ''continuation of coverage'' mandates, laws which allow individuals to continue purchasing health insurance through a previous employer for a specified number of months after leaving the firm. By allowing individuals to maintain their employer-provided health insurance after retirement, these laws decrease the cost of early retirement for those who do not have other retiree health insurance available. Using data on 55-64 year old men from the Current Population Survey, we find that one year of continuation benefits increases the probability of being retired by 1 percentage point; this represents a 5.4 percent increase in the baseline probability of being retired for this group. We also find that continuation mandates increase the likelihood of being insured after retirement.

Workers'' compensation insurance provides cash payments and medical benefits to workers who incur a work-related injury or illness. Many features of the workers'' compensation program parallel features of proposed mandated employer-paid health insurance plans. This paper empirically examines the incidence of the workers'' compensation program to infer the likely consequences of mandated health insurance proposals. In certain industries, such as trucking and carpentry, workers'' compensation insurance costs are quite large, and vary tremendously within states over time, and across states at a moment in time. This variation is used to identify the incidence of the program. Empirical analysis of two data sets suggest that changes in employers'' costs of workers'' compensation insurance are largely shifted to employees in the form of lower wages. In addition, higher insurance costs are found to have a negative but statistically insignificant effect on employment. The implied elasticity of labor demand from our results is about -.50.

While efforts to improve the health of the uninsured have focused on demand side policies such as increasing insurance coverage, supply side changes may be equally important. Yet there is little direct evidence on the effect of policies designed to increase the supply of Medicaid services to the poor. We provide such evidence by examining the relationship between infant mortality and the ratio of Medicaid fees to private fees for obstetrician/gynecologists. We build a state and year specific index of the fee ratio for 1979-1992, a period of substantial variation in relative Medicaid fees. We find that increases in fee ratios are associated with significant declines in the infant mortality rate. We also find that higher fees raise payments made to physicians and clinics under the Medicaid program, but reduce payments to hospitals. Finally, we compare the cost effectiveness of reducing infant mortality by increasing fee ratios to the efficacy of reducing mortality by expanding the Medicaid eligibility of pregnant women. Although our results are sensitive to the time period used, we conclude that raising fee ratios is at least as cost effective as increasing eligibility.

The magnitude of provider uncompensated care has become an important public policy issue. Yet existing measures of uncompensated care are flawed because they compare uninsured payments to list prices, not to the prices actually paid by the insured. We address this issue using a novel source of data from a vendor that processes financial data for almost 4000 physicians. We measure uncompensated care as the net amount that physicians lose by lower payments from the uninsured than from the insured. Our best estimate is that physicians provide negative uncompensated care to the uninsured, earning more on uninsured patients than on insured patients with comparable treatments. Even our most conservative estimates suggest that uncompensated care amounts to only 0.8% of revenues, or at most $3.2 billion nationally. These results highlight the important distinction between charges and payments, and point to the need for a re-definition of uncompensated care in the health sector going forward.

The continued rise in the number of non-elderly Americans without health insurance has led to considerable interest in tax-based policies to raise the level of insurance coverage. This paper describes a detailed microsimulation model that has been developed to evaluate such tax-based polices, and its findings for the impact of polices on government costs and insurance coverage. I find that while tax subsidies could significantly increase insurance coverage, even very generous tax policies could not cover more than a sizable minority of the uninsured population. But there are several design features which can clearly make tax policy more effective: using tax credits rather than deductions; making credits refundable; and addressing the timing mismatch between when insurance purchases are made and tax refunds are received. I also document a clear tradeoff between the scope of tax subsidies and their efficiency.

Regular church attendance is strongly associated with a higher probability of voting. It is an open question as to whether this association, which has been confirmed in numerous surveys, is causal. We use the repeal of the laws restricting Sunday retail activity ("blue laws") to measure the effects of church-going on political participation. The repeal of blue laws caused a 5 percent decrease in church attendance. We measure the effect of blue laws'' repeal on political participation and find that following the repeal turnout falls by approximately 1 percentage point. This turnout decline, which is statistically significant and fairly robust across model specifications, is consistent with the large effect of church attendance on turnout reported in the literature, and suggests that church attendance may have significant causal influence on voter turnout.

While there has been considerable research on the disincentive effects of cash welfare under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, there is little evidence on the benefits of the program for single mothers and their children. One potential benefit of this program is that it provides short-run consumption insurance for women at the point that they become single mothers. This is only true, however, to the extent that the program is not crowding out other sources of support, such as own savings, labor supply, or transfers from others. I assess the importance of this insurance mechanism by measuring the extent to which AFDC smooths the consumption of women who transition to single motherhood. I use longitudinal data on family structure and consumption expenditures on food and housing from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), matched to information on the welfare benefits available in each state and year over the 1968-1985 period. I find that raising potential benefits by one dollar raises the food and housing consumption of all women who become single mothers (and their families) by 30 cents. This estimate implies that for each dollar of AFDC received by this population their consumption of these categories of goods rises by up to 95 cents. This consumption smoothing benefit appears to be larger for women who become single mothers through marital dissolution, rather than through out-of-wedlock childbearing; this is due to increased housing expenditures of the former group but not of the latter.

Jonathan Gruber’s market-leading Public Finance and Public Policy was the first textbook to truly reflect the way public policy is created, implemented, and researched. Like no other text available, it integrated real-world empirical work and coverage of transfer programs and social insurance into the traditional topics of public finance. By augmenting the traditional approach of public finance texts with a true integration of theory, application, and evidence, Public Finance and Public Policy engages students like no other public finance text. Thoroughly updated, this timely new edition gives students the basic tools they need to understand the driving issues of public policy today, including healthcare, education, global climate change, entitlements, and more.

Many countries have social security systems that are currently financially unsustainable. Economists and policy makers have long studied this problem and identified two key causes. First, as declining birth rates raise the share of older persons in the population, the ratio of retirees to benefits-paying employees increases. Second, as falling mortality rates increase lifespans, retirees receive benefits for longer than in the past. Further exacerbating the situation, the provisions of social security programs often provide strong incentives to leave the labor force. "Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World" offers comparative analysis from twelve countries and examines the issue of age in the labor force. A notable group of contributors analyzes the relationship between incentives to retire and the proportion of older persons in the workforce, the effects that reforming social security would have on the employment rates of older workers, and how extending labor force participation will affect program costs. Dispelling the myth that employing older workers takes jobs away from the young, this timely volume challenges a raft of existing assumptions about the relationship between old and young people in the workforce.