Applied Economics on AI, Healthcare & Finance
Applied economics on AI, finance and deals by Vivek Raj Anand. I write about how businesses adopt AI and what it returns, how platform giants reshape startup markets, and what really happens inside carve-outs, LBOs and bank runs, with charts built in code.
Ending Pandemic Unemployment Benefits Early: What Public Card Data Can and Can't See
Coombs, Dube and coauthors found a 20 percent spending drop among workers who lost pandemic unemployment benefits in 2021. I test whether public card data show it, with a staggered differ...
Google AI Edge Foresight Review: Why Frontier Labs Move Into Apps, and Who Keeps the Token Rent
AI labs route or ration when they pay for the tokens and leave the choice to you when you pay. An economist's read of Google AI Edge Foresight, wha...
ICHRA's Real Prize Is Members Who Stay
Risk adjustment claws back most of the margin on healthier ICHRA members. What a carrier keeps is members who stay enrolled and buy richer plans, a...
Is AI Paying Off for Businesses? It Pays Back Where a Meter Is Already Running
Half the businesses on Ramp now pay for AI. From two deployments I measured, the proven returns sit in work that was already metered, partly becaus...
The One Big Beautiful Bill's Health Cuts Run on a Slow Fuse
The law cuts about $1 trillion from federal health spending, but most of the pain arrives after 2026, and payer stocks did not trade the Medicaid v...
What's new in the SVB collapse?
Two things were new in the SVB bank run: withdrawals at the speed of a group chat, and a bank declared systemic in one weekend. An economist's view...
Twitter Deal: Free Speech, LBO, and of course, Drama.
An LBO model of Elon Musk's Twitter takeover in three scenarios. At 54 times trailing EBITDA, my base case returns about 4% a year, close to a 10-y...
Carve-out Complexities: Why Tech Separations Cost More Than the Deal Model Says
Why tech carve-outs cost more than the deal model says: standalone cost under information asymmetry, TSAs as incomplete contracts, entangled code, ...