We investigate the presence of moral hazard and advantageous or adverse selection in a market for supplementary health insurance. For this we specify and estimate dynamic models for health insurance decisions and health care utilization. Estimates of the health care utilization models indicate...

In Germany, employees are generally obliged to participate in the public health insurance system, where coverage is universal, co-payments and deductibles are moderate, and premia are based on income. However, they may buy private insurance instead if their income exceeds the compulsory...

Would you go to the dentist more often if it were free? Observational data is here used to analyze the impact of full-coverage insurance on dental care utilization using different identification strategies. The challenge of assessing the bite of moral hazard without an experimental study design...

We investigate whether people enrolled into voluntary health insurance (VHI) substitute public consumption with private (opt out) or just enlarge their private consumption, without reducing reliance upon public provisions (top up). We study the case of Italy, where a mixed insurance system is in...

This paper is motivated by our attempt to answer an empirical question: how is private health insurance take-up in Australia affected by the income threshold at which the Medicare Levy Surcharge (MLS) kicks in? We propose a new difference de-convolution kernel estimator for the location and size...

Canada's restrictions on the role of private health insurance for publicly insured physician and hospital services are unique among countries with universal, publicly funded health care systems. Pressure is mounting in Canada, however, to loosen these restrictions and create a parallel system of...

The empirical evidence of adverse selection in insurance markets is mixed. The problem in assessing the extent of adverse selection is that private information, on which agents act, is generally unobservable to the researcher, which makes it difficult to distinguish between adverse selection and...

Micro data from a dental insurance natural experiment is used to analyze why agents opt out of insurance. The purpose is to relate the dropout decision to new information on risk, acquired by the policy holder and the insurer. The results show that agents tend to leave the insurance when...

Penalty mandates are used in many countries to encourage people to purchase health insurance. But are they effective? We use a large administrative dataset for a 10% random sample of all Australian tax-filers to study how people respond to a step-wise age-based mandate, and whether this has...