Certificate of Need Laws and Health Care Prices

Certificate of Need laws, currently in force in 35 US states, require proposed health care facilities to gain the permission of a state board before opening or expanding. We aim to determine how Certificate of Need laws affect health care prices. We analyze state-level data on health care prices from the Health Care Cost Institute from 2012-2013 to compare prices in states with and without Certificate of Need laws using linear regression. We find that states with Certificate of Need laws have higher prices than states without Certificate of Need laws, but this difference is not statistically significant. New data on US health care prices will increasingly allow researchers to evaluate how policy affects these prices, though we cannot yet precisely estimate the effect of Certificate of Need laws on prices

Expert product reviews and conflict of interest

Many firms that produce expert product reviews benefit from increased sales of the products they review, resulting in a conflict of interest. We evaluate expert product reviews from a video game magazine owned by a game retailer. We find evidence of review inflation for lower-quality games and in periods shortly following the release of a game\u27s corresponding hardware. These results are consistent with theoretical predictions for a firm that optimizes the trade-off between sales revenue and the reputational costs associated with biasing review