About

Kurt Lavetti is an Associate Professor of Economics at The Ohio State University, affiliated with the Institute for Population Research. His contact information includes an email address lavetti.1@osu.edu and a phone number 614-292-1148. He is involved in research related to health and mortality, and his professional activities are based at Townshend Hall, 1885 Neil Ave Mall, Columbus, OH 43210. Further details about his research focus or contributions are not provided in the available page content.

Research topics

• Economics
• Labour economics
• Marketing
• Family medicine
• Market economy
• Medicine
• Econometrics
• Business
• Monetary economics

Selected publications

• Data and Code for: "The Effect of Noncompete Enforceability on Productivity: Evidence from a New State-Level Manufacturing"

  ICPSR Data Holdings · 2026-01-01

  datasetOpen access

  The code in this replication package constructs the analysis file from the raw data sources (U.S. Census Bureau; U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; Becker et. al, 2021; Chirinko and Wilson, 2009; Johnson, Lavetti, and Lipsitz, 2025) using Stata. Three script files run all of the code to generate all the data for the 2 figures and 3 tables in the paper. The replicator should expect the code to run for about 10 minutes on a production server (3.2 GHz CPU).<br><br>Constructed data products for "Manufacturing" and "All Industries" can be directly downloaded from the Processed-Data folder.

  PublisherDOI

• The Effect of Noncompete Enforceability on Productivity: Evidence from a New State-Level Manufacturing Dataset

  AEA Papers and Proceedings · 2026-05-01

  article

  Roughly 20 percent of US workers have noncompete agreements (NCAs), restricting their ability to join or form competing firms after separating from their employer. While there is now evidence that stricter NCA enforceability reduces wages, effects on productivity are a priori unclear. Enforcing NCAs might lower productivity by discouraging worker effort, creating mismatch in labor markets, or reducing innovation and entrepreneurship. Alternatively, enforcing NCAs might increase productivity by encouraging firm investment. We estimate the net effect of legal NCA enforceability on productivity by introducing a novel dataset on state-level manufacturing.

  PublisherDOI

• Data and Code for: "The Effect of Noncompete Enforceability on Productivity: Evidence from a New State-Level Manufacturing"

  ICPSR Data Holdings · 2026-01-01

  datasetOpen access

  The code in this replication package constructs the analysis file from the raw data sources (U.S. Census Bureau; U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; Becker et. al, 2021; Chirinko and Wilson, 2009; Johnson, Lavetti, and Lipsitz, 2025) using Stata. Three script files run all of the code to generate all the data for the 2 figures and 3 tables in the paper. The replicator should expect the code to run for about 10 minutes on a production server (3.2 GHz CPU).<br><br>Constructed data products for "Manufacturing" and "All Industries" can be directly downloaded from the Processed-Data folder.

  PublisherDOI

• The Role of Insurers in Health Care Spending and Production: Evidence from Utah

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-12-01

  reportOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Workplace Stratification and Racial Health Disparities

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-02-01

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  To what extent is a worker's relative rank within their workplace a determinant of health status, conditional on income?We provide the first US-based evidence on the relationship between relative workplace rank and health status for the near population of workers in one US state.Using a new linkage of commercial all-payer health insurance data to administrative earnings records for workers in Utah from 2013-2015, we quantify the impact of relative workplace rank on health status, the incidence of specific chronic diseases, and racial health disparities.We show that about 70% of SES-health gradient that is commonly interpreted as an income gradient actually operates through relative rank.For an average worker, moving from the 90th to the 10th percentile of withinfirm rank holding fixed income, age, location, and health insurance characteristics is associated with a 16.5% increase in morbidity.The racial segregation of jobs in the US leads minority workers to be overrepresented in lower-ranked jobs within firms, which in turn exacerbates racial health disparities.

  PublisherDOI

• The Labor Market Effects of Legal Restrictions on Worker Mobility

  Journal of Political Economy · 2025-04-17 · 9 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• How do low‐income enrollees in the Affordable Care Act marketplaces respond to cost‐sharing?

  Journal of Risk & Insurance · 2023-01-20 · 11 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The Affordable Care Act requires insurers to offer cost sharing reductions (CSRs) to low-income consumers on the Marketplaces. We link 2013-2015 All-Payer Claims Data to 2004-2013 administrative hospital discharge data from Utah and exploit policy-driven differences in the actuarial value of CSR plans that are solely determined by income. This allows us to examine the effect of cost sharing on medical spending among low-income individuals. We find that enrollees facing lower levels of cost sharing have higher levels of health care spending, controlling for past health care use. We estimate demand elasticities of total health care spending among this low-income population of approximately -0.12, suggesting that demand-side price mechanisms in health insurance design work similarly for low-income and higher-income individuals. We also find that cost sharing subsidies substantially lower out-of-pocket medical care spending, showing that the CSR program is a key mechanism for making health care affordable to low-income individuals.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How Do Low-Income Enrollees in the Affordable Care Act Marketplaces Respond to Cost Sharing?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Labor Market Effects of Legal Restrictions on Worker Mobility

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• The Labor Market Effects of Legal Restrictions on Worker Mobility

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2023-12-01 · 34 citations

  reportOpen access

  We analyze how the legal enforceability of noncompete agreements (NCAs) affects labor markets.Using newly-constructed panel data, we find that higher NCA enforceability diminishes workers' earnings and job mobility, with larger effects among workers most likely to sign NCAs.These effects are far-reaching: changes in enforceability impose externalities on workers across state borders, suggesting that enforceability broadly affects labor market dynamism.We provide evidence that NCA enforceability primarily affects wages through its effect on workers' outside options; moreover, workers facing high enforceability are unable to leverage tight labor markets to increase earnings.We motivate these findings by embedding NCA enforceability in a search model with bargaining.Finally, higher NCA enforceability exacerbates gender and racial earnings gaps.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Kosali Simon

  Indiana University Bloomington

  15 shared

• William D. White

  11 shared

• Carol Simon

  Lewin Group (United States)

  10 shared

• Thomas DeLeire

  Georgetown University

  9 shared

• Nicolas R. Ziebarth

  Centre for European Economic Research

  7 shared

• Michael Lipsitz

  Federal Trade Commission

  3 shared

• Ian M. Schmutte

  3 shared

• Matthew S. Johnson

  2 shared

Education

• PhD, Economics

  Cornell University

  2011

• BS, Economics

  Boston College

  2004