This chapter summarizes the many aspects of public policy for health care. I first consider government policy affecting individual behaviors. Government intervention to change individual actions such as smoking and drinking is frequently justified on externality grounds. External costs of...

This article describes the anatomy of health insurance. It begins by considering the optimal design of health insurance policies. Such policies must make tradeoffs appropriately between risk sharing on the one hand and agency problems such as moral hazard (the incentive of people to seek more...

Stiglitz [1977], considering asymmetry of information in a monopolistic insurance market and the monetary deductible as a screening device, shows that an equilibrium is always of a separating type. High risks buy complete insurance whilst low risks buy partial insurance. In this paper, we show...

We investigate a firm's choice of prices and qualities of a product line to signal competitive advantage to potential entrants and to discourage entry. The market consists of customer segments with different valuations for product quality. We demonstrate that a higher quality and a higher price...

We shed light on the function, properties and optimal size of austerity using the standard sovereign model augmented to include incomplete information about credit risk. Austerity is defined as the shortfall of consumption from the level desired by a country and supported by its repayment...

El mercado de seguro privado de enfermedad constituye en la actualidad en España, como en buena parte de los países de la Unión Europea, uno de los principales motores de todo el conjunto de la actividad aseguradora. Su desarrollo no sólo ha de contemplarse dentro del marco del sector del...

We analyze exclusive contracts between health care providers and insurers in a model where some consumers choose to stay uninsured. In case of a monopoly insurer, exclusion of a provider changes the distribution of consumers who choose not to insure. Although the foreclosed care provider remains...

I use data on the hospital networks offered by managed care health insurers to estimate the expected division of profits between insurers and providers. I include a simple profit-maximization framework and an additional effect: hospitals that can secure demand without contracting with all...

Employers must determine which sorts of healthcare insurance plans to offer employees and also set employee premiums for each plan provided. Depending on how they structure the premiums that employees pay across different healthcare insurance plans, plan sponsors alter the incentives to choose...