James Gluzman

James Gluzman

Ph.D. Candidate in Economics

Posts by Collection

portfolio

publications

Long Term Care in the United States and Around the World: Caring for those with Severe Cognitive Impairment

with Gopi Shah Goda, Brian McGarry and Kathleen McGarry. (Draft available upon request)

The population of the United States, along with much of the world, is aging rapidly, with long-term care expenditures accounting for roughly 2% of GDP. Using the Health Retirment Survey, we use measures of respondents’ cognition and long-term care usage to quantify the long-term care cost burden of severe cognitive impairment. We show that individuals with severe cognitive impairment are significantly more likely to use informal care, formal care, and nursing home care than those without cognitive impairments, with informal care being the most common type of support. We place an economic value on each type of care, valuing informal care using the forgone wage method. Our findings indicate that the cost burden attributable to severe cognitive impairment represents nearly 50% of all long-term care costs, despite this group constituting only about 6% of the population. Finally, we compare these estimates with evidence from other countries to place the U.S. experience in an international context.

Paper Title Number 5, with math \(E=mc^2\)

This paper is about a famous math equation, \(E=mc^2\)

Recommended citation: Your Name, You. (2024). "Paper Title Number 3." GitHub Journal of Bugs. 1(3).
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Regulation of Contract Generosity in Selection Markets: The Case of Medicare Advantage

with Yiyi Zhou. (Under review)

In selection markets where serving different consumers incurs different costs, private firms may engage in cream-skimming by designing their contracts to attract profitable consumers and avoid unprofitable consumers, potentially harming consumer welfare. Policymakers have often tackled this issue by imposing direct restrictions on the level of generosity firms can offer. However, the impact of such regulations on welfare remains unclear, contingent on the market’s level of selection and other policies in place. Our study of the Medicare Advantage market reveals that consumers exhibit diverse healthcare needs and considerable moral hazard. The recent regulation on maximum out-of-pocket expenses, mandated by the Affordable Care Act, improves consumer welfare by 19% on average, especially benefiting those with high healthcare needs, while compressing private insurers’ markups. Government spending on the Medicare program decreases as the reduction in spending on Traditional Medicare outweighs the increased subsidies to private insurers.

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The Welfare Effects of Accountable Care Organizations

Job Market Paper.

This paper studies the welfare effects of Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), a policy whose goal is to reduce healthcare spending for Traditional Medicare patients. ACOs are groups of healthcare providers whose performance is evaluated by comparing a spending benchmark to the total outpatient and inpatient spending of assigned patients. Spending below the benchmark results in a financial reward given to the ACO, while spending above the benchmark results in a penalty. The welfare impact of this policy is theoretically ambiguous, as lower spending may reduce quality of care. To quantify these effects, I develop a structural model of supply and demand in the Medicare outpatient facility market where facilities compete in outpatient spending and quality. The model incorporates endogenous quality provision and spillovers onto Medicare Advantage patients, whose healthcare spending is not directly targeted by the program. I estimate the model using the universe of hospital-based claims from New York State. A counterfactual simulation that removes ACOs from the market shows that ACOs increase welfare by $1.09 billion. Spillovers onto Medicare Advantage patients account for 32% of the consumer welfare gains.

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talks

teaching

Health Economics

Winter 2024, Summer 2024, Winter 2025, Summer 2025 - This course provides a broad overview of health policy, both in the U.S. and abroad, and explores the role that economic theory plays in the national healthcare reform debate. Students will be introduced to several theoretical tools and empirical observations used in economics to better understand the economic problems present in healthcare markets. We will explore the demand of healthcare, the supply of healthcare, and the role of information economics in the healthcare sector. We will apply these three topics to a discussion of public policy in the healthcare sector. We will use our economic tools to better understand market failures in the healthcare sector and the role for health policy to address these issues. By the end of the course, students should be able to analyze public policy in healthcare from an economist’s perspective.

Mathematical Foundations of Contemporary Economic Theory (Math Camp)

Summer 2024, Summer 2025 - This course aims to introduce and remind you of the mathematics required for M.A. and Ph.D. courses in economics. In this course, we will learn standard tools and cookbook procedures that are required for first-year courses. Lectures are divided into six modules: sets and spaces, functions, linear algebra, differentiability, optimization and numerical methods.

Mathematical Statistics

Spring 2024, Spring 2025 - Randomness and uncertain events are an inherent part of the environment that we study as economists. The first part of this course will introduce the mathematics associated with probability theory, and its practical applications. In the second part of this course, we will use the tools we learned in probability theory to provide a basis for statistical inference. This course serves as an important baseline for working with and analyzing data, and the statistical properties associated with models and techniques used in subsequent courses in econometrics.