The demand for skills training among Medicaid home-based caregivers.

Medicaid spends nearly 100 billion dollars annually on home and community-based care for the disabled. Much of this care is provided by personal care aides, few of whom have received training related to the services they provide. We conducted a randomized controlled trial to estimate their demand for training.

The drug crisis and the living arrangements of children.

We examine the impact of the US drug crisis on children's living arrangements. Because factors that lead to drug use could also alter family structure, we instrument for the intensity of the drug crisis with cross-state exposure to marketing of the prescription opioid at the epicenter of the crisis. We find that the crisis increased the likelihood that a child lives away from a parent or in a household headed by a grandparent.

ORIGINS OF THE OPIOID CRISIS AND ITS ENDURING IMPACTS.

Overdose deaths involving opioids have increased dramatically since the 1990s, leading to the worst drug overdose epidemic in U.S. history, but there is limited empirical evidence about the initial causes.

Targeting with In-Kind Transfers: Evidence from Medicaid Home Care.

Making a transfer in kind reduces its value to recipients but can improve targeting. We develop an approach to quantifying this tradeoff and apply it to home care. Using randomized experiments by Medicaid, we find that in-kind provision significantly reduces the value of the transfer to recipients while targeting a small fraction of the eligible population that is sicker and has fewer informal caregivers than the average eligible.