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.

Does health insurance coverage fall when nonprofit insurers become for-profits?

In exchange for tax exemptions, Blue Cross and Blue Shield (BCBS) health insurers were expected to provide health insurance to the "bad risks," those for whom coverage was unavailable from other insurers. I present evidence that five years after a BCBS plan converted to for-profit status, the probability of having insurance was 1.4 percentage points higher, a 9% reduction in the uninsured.