Title: Nursing home quality as a public good
Description: "There has been much debate among economists about whether nursing home quality is a public good across Medicaid and private-pay patients within a common facility.  However, there has been only limited empirical work addressing this issue.  Using a unique individual level panel of residents of nursing homes from seven states, we exploit both within-facility and within-patient variation in payer source and quality to examine this issue.  We also test the robustness of these results across states with different Medicaid and private-pay rate differentials.  Across our various identification strategies, the results generally support the idea that quality is a public good within nursing homes.  That is, within a common nursing home, there is very little evidence to suggest that Medicaid-funded residents receive consistently lower quality care relative to their private-paying counterparts"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.