We estimate the demand for health insurance in the California Affordable Care Act marketplace (Covered California) without using parametric assumptions about the unobserved components of utility. To do this, we develop a computational method for constructing sharp identified sets in a...

This paper examines how compensation packages change when health insurance premiums rise. We use data on employee choices within a single large firm with a flexible benefits plan; an increasingly common arrangement among medium and large firms. In these companies, employees explicitly choose how...

Nonlinear cost-sharing in health insurance encourages intertemporal substitution be- cause patients can reduce their out-of-pocket costs by concentrating spending in years when they hit the deductible. We test for such intertemporal substitution using data from the RAND Health Insurance...

We develop a structural model for bounding welfare effects of policies that alter the design of differentiated product markets when some consumers may be misinformed about product characteristics and inertia in consumer behavior reflects a mixture of latent preferences, information costs,...

A large literature has analyzed pricing inefficiencies in health insurance markets due to adverse selection, typically assuming informed, active consumers on the demand side of the market. However, recent evidence suggests that many consumers have information frictions that lead to suboptimal...

Neoclassical and psychological models of consumer behavior often make divergent predictions for the welfare effects of paternalistic policies, leaving wide scope for researchers' choice of a model to influence their policy conclusions. We develop a framework to reduce this model uncertainty and...

Prior studies suggest that consumer-directed health plans (CDHPs) -characterized by high deductibles and health care accounts- reduce health costs, but there is concern that enrollees indiscriminately reduce use of low-value services (e.g., unnecessary emergency department use) and high-value...

The politicization of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was extreme, with the popular moniker of "Obamacare" and 54 House attempts to repeal the law in the four years after passage. Our study set out to understand Washington state public's preferences about enrolling into ACA driven health insurance...

Recent years have seen enormous growth in limited network plans that restrict patient choice of provider, particularly through state exchanges under the ACA. Opposition to such plans is based on concerns that restrictions on provider choice will harm patient care. We explore this issue in the...

Public attention has focused on how the launch of the national health exchanges could impact the types of risks who initially enroll and thereby affect future premiums and enrollment. We introduce simple dynamics into a standard model of insurance under adverse selection to show that such...