This note considers a relatively new form of financing for social services, the "Social Impact Bond." Proponents of Social Impact Bonds argue that they present a solution to several problems in funding social services, including performance measurement and the distribution of risk. Using a...

Medicare Part D provides prescription drug coverage through Medicare approved plans offered by private insurance companies and HMOs. In this paper, we study the role of current prescription drug use and health risks, related expectations, and subjective factors in the demand for prescription...

This paper assesses the impact of employer-provided health insurance on job mobility by exploring the extent to which workers are 'locked' into their jobs because preexisting conditions exclusions make it expensive for individuals with medical problems to relinquish their current health...

Because individuals aged 55-64 face large and uncertain medical expenditures without the guarantee of public insurance coverage provided by Medicare, the availability of post-retirement health insurance could be an important determinant in the retirement decisions of this group. We investigate...

The link between health insurance and the workplace in the U.S. has led to concern over the possibility of insurance-induced reductions in job mobility or 'job-lock". Designing health insurance reforms which retain employer-based insurance coverage but mitigate the extent of job-lock requires an...

In many countries, social security insures firms against their workers' sickness absences. The insurance may create a moral hazard for firms, leading to inefficient monitoring of absences or to an underinvestment in the prevention of absences. We exploit an administrative threshold in the...

Reforms introduced by the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act (ACA) build new sources of coverage around employment-based health insurance. But what if firms find it cheaper to have their employees obtain insurance from these sources, even after accounting for penalties (for non-provision...

We describe the risks faced by the ageing population and survey the corresponding insurance markets for these risks. We focus on income risk, health expenditure risk, long-term care expenditure risk and mortality risk. We also discuss the interactions between social insurance and private...

The steady state general equilibrium and welfare consequences of health insurance reform are evaluated in a calibrated life-cycle economy with incomplete markets and endogenous labor supply. Individuals face uncertainty each period about their future health status, medical expenditures, labor...

Public health insurance programs comprise a large share of federal and state government expenditures. Although a sizable literature analyzes the effects of these programs on health care utilization and health outcomes, little prior work has examined the long-term effects and resultant health...