Katja Hofmann

Panic buying describes a sudden, unanticipated surge in demand, triggered by a real or perceived disruption. In anticipation, consumers front-load purchases, congest the market, and raise the risk of shortages. When prices are slow to adjust, the market resorts to non-price rationing, with ambiguous effects on allocative efficiency across heterogeneous consumers. We study the welfare and allocative effects of panic buying in the context of the 2021 UK fuel crisis, in which a nationwide news shock about potential delivery disruptions caused long queues and widespread shortages at gas stations. We combine novel data on station wait times and card transactions to study two sources of welfare loss: elevated shopping costs and misallocation. We develop a model in which heterogeneous consumers trade off the benefit from refueling, given their belief about future fuel availability, against endogenously determined shopping costs. We benchmark consumer surplus in equilibrium against the optimal fuel allocation and find substantial losses driven by misallocation: Consumers who would have refilled in normal times are crowded out by those who front-load purchases. The size in surplus loss critically depends on consumers' beliefs. If beliefs are too pessimistic, front-loading is welfare detrimental as consumers forgo the option value of waiting. We evaluate alternative allocation rules and their potential in mitigating these losses.

The Affordable Care Act closed an intentional coverage gap in Medicare Part D, which previously required beneficiaries to pay 100% of drug spending on the margin. The closure was partially funded by mandating drug manufacturers cover 50% of branded drug costs in the gap. We study how beneficiaries responded to the insurance expansion and how drug prices changed subsequently. Beneficiaries became 45% less likely to forgo prescriptions upon reaching the gap. However, manufacturers raised brand-name drug prices by 21%, substantially reverting the insurance expansion. While the average beneficiary received a $55 transfer, the median beneficiary incurred a $7 cost.

We link 2011-2019 administrative Medicaid data with detailed records on abortion‑facility operations to quantify the causal relationship between travel distance to the nearest abortion facility and young women's physical and mental health. Focusing on young women aged 15-18 who are eligible for Medicaid regardless of pregnancy status, we use within-person variation in distance from a beneficiary's residence ZIP code to the nearest brick-and-mortar facility providing abortion services in an event-study design. A 50-mile increase in distance results in a 0.23 percentage point (30%) increase in the probability that a young Medicaid beneficiary gives birth four quarters later. We also find evidence of corresponding increases in the incidences of pregnancy complications (0.43 percentage points; 23%) and severe maternal morbidity (0.04 percentage points; 57%), suggesting that the marginal teen faces elevated risks following an increase in travel distance. We detect no measurable effects on mental-health diagnoses. The results indicate that reduced access to abortion services increases maternal health burdens for low-income adolescents.

Motivated by the findings in Chetty et al. (2016), we study the relationship between income and life expectancy in various developed countries. This project, lead by Maria Polyakova, involves research teams from around the world.

Intergenerational persistence in educational achievement is well documented. Yet, occupational heritability in selective disciplines, such as medicine, has received comparably less attention, despite concerns about socioeconomic diversity in the physician workforce and growing evidence that physician diversity might affect patient outcomes. We study occupational heritability in medicine from educational records of individuals born in 1950-90 and living in Sweden at some time during 2001-16, and their deceased relatives, allowing mapping of family trees of physicians spanning up to three generations. In recent cohorts of physicians in Sweden, one in five physicians had a parent who was also a physician, more than triple the proportion seen for physicians born three decades earlier. A similar pattern was not found among lawyers, suggesting that increasing occupational heritability in medicine does not reflect intergenerational persistence of high paying degrees alone but rather that medicine might increasingly run in families.