Yun Ling
Email: yling335@gmail.com
Working Papers
What drives quality? Competition and regulation in the dialysis industry (PDF)
Abstract:
I first document the improvement of medical quality following two concurrently implemented nationwide policies, and then examine the effects of two separate channels -- competition and price regulation. The two policies implemented are: (1) mandated information disclosure on medical quality through in-center posters; (2) a new price regulation, pay-for-performance payment method, which monetarily punished substandard clinical performance. Information disclosure increases patients' awareness of medical quality, and therefore affects competition, whereas pay-for-performance method directly links prices Medicare pays to medical quality. Estimating a model of patients' demand and clinics' quality-setting game, I quantify the importance of competition and pay-for-performance in driving clinics' choices of medical quality. In a counterfactual where quality competition is shut down, there is a 67% decrease in mean quality compared to when quality competition and pay-for-performance payment are both present, which is evidence that competition is important in driving medical quality.
Common Application and price competition between U.S. colleges (PDF)
I empirically examine how Common Application (CAPP), a platform that standardizes college applications and reduces time cost of additional applications, affects students’ applications and colleges’ prices. I find that students send out 0.56 (17%) more applications when flagship public universities in their states adopt CAPP. Furthermore, an increase of 10 percentage points in within-state CAPP adoption rate decreases actual prices paid by students at private universities by 9.4%.