Liran Einav

We investigate the impact of a unique legislative reform that granted anonymity to plaintiffs in court rulings for personal injury claims. Prior to the reform’s implementation in August 2015, claimants who rejected settlement offers faced the risk that court proceedings would publicly disclose sensitive information regarding their health and earnings. By eliminating this source of privacy loss, the reform provides an opportunity to examine how privacy considerations affect outcomes in a real-world setting. Our analysis measures changes in payments for personal injury versus property damage claims (which were not affected by the reform) for car accident cases handled by the major insurance firms in Israel between 2011 and 2020. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we find that the reform led to a 12%–17% increase in payments for personal injury claims. We interpret this estimate as the implicit cost claimants were previously willing to bear, in the form of lower settlements, to avoid the disclosure of private information through court rulings. This result underscores the economic value individuals place on privacy, revealing that concerns about public exposure can significantly influence decision making and negotiation outcomes. Our findings demonstrate the importance of privacy considerations in customer interactions where sensitive information is often involved. This paper was accepted by Dorothea Kübler, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: This work was supported by the Ministry of Justice of Israel [Grant 88/2024], The Falk Institute [Grant 24.03], and the Israel Science Foundation [Grant 1224/24]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2025.00107 .

We compare care for Black vs. White patients following pulse oximetry, a widely used device for measuring blood oxygen levels which overestimates oxygen saturation in darker-skinned patients. Black patients are therefore medically more appropriate for follow-up care than White patients with the same pulse oximetry reading. Yet, using data from the Veterans Health Administration on 3.5 million emergency department visits between 2014 and 2018, we find that Black patients systematically receive lower rates of follow-up care than White patients with the same reading. Our findings illustrate how bias in a medical screening device can be propagated and potentially amplified in downstream care.

We develop a stylized model that allows us to estimate a value‐added measure for nursing homes (“SNFs”) which accounts for patient selection both into and out of a SNF. We use the model, together with detailed data on the physical and mental health of about 6 million Medicare SNF patients between 2011 and 2016, to estimate the value added for about 14,000 distinct SNFs. We document substantial heterogeneity in value added. Nationwide, compared to a 10th percentile SNF, a 90th percentile SNF is able to discharge a patient at the same health level almost a week sooner, or one quarter of the median length of stay. Heterogeneity in value added within a market is almost as large as it is nationwide. Our results point to the potential for substantial gains through policies that encourage reallocation of patients to higher‐quality SNFs within their market.

There is substantial waste in U.S. healthcare but little consensus on how to combat it. We identify one source of waste: long-term care hospitals (LTCHs). Using the entry of LTCHs into hospital markets in an event study design, we find that most LTCH patients would have counterfactually received care at Skilled Nursing Facilities—facilities that provide medically similar care but are paid significantly less—and that substitution to LTCHs leaves patients unaffected or worse off on all dimensions we can objectively measure. Our results imply Medicare could save about $4.6 billion per year by not allowing discharge to LTCHs.

We estimate the impact of increased access to telemedicine following widespread adoption during the March–April 2020 COVID-19 lockdown period. We focus on the post-lockdown period, which was characterized by near-complete reopening. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we compare primary care episodes before and after the lockdown between patients with high and low access to telemedicine, as defined by their primary care physician adoption. Our results show that access to telemedicine leads to slightly more primary care visits but lower spending. Visits involve fewer prescriptions and more follow-ups, but we find no evidence of missed diagnoses or adverse outcomes. Results suggest that telemedicine does not compromise care quality or raise costs.

We study the sources of high end-of-life spending for cancer patients. Even among patients with similar initial prognoses, spending in the year postdiagnosis is over twice as high for those who die within the year than those who survive. Elevated spending on decedents is predominantly driven by higher inpatient spending, particularly low-intensity admissions. However, most such admissions do not result in death, making it difficult to target spending reductions. Furthermore, end-of-life spending is substantially more elevated for younger patients, compared to older patients with similar prognoses. Results highlight sources of high end-of-life spending without revealing any natural “remedies.”

Health insurance coverage in the United States is highly uncertain. In the post-Affordable Care Act (ACA), pre-COVID United States, we estimate that while 12.5% of individuals under 65 are uninsured at a point in time, twice as many—one in four—are uninsured at some point over a 2-y period. Moreover, the risk of losing insurance remained virtually unchanged with the introduction of the landmark ACA. Risk of insurance loss is particularly high for those with health insurance through Medicaid or private exchanges; they have a 20% chance of losing coverage at some point over a 2-y period, compared to 8.5% for those with employer-provided coverage. Those who lose insurance can experience prolonged periods without coverage; about half are still uninsured 6 mo later, and almost one-quarter are uninsured for the subsequent 2 y. These facts suggest that research and policy attention should focus not only on the “headline number” of the share of the population uninsured at a point in time, but also on the stability and certainty (or lack thereof) of being insured.