This proposal involves the establishment of ‘welfare accounts’ for every person in a country. There are four accounts: a retirement account (covering pensions), an unemployment account (covering unemployment support), a human capital account (covering education and training), and a health...

In a model where patients face budget constraints that make some treatments unaffordable, we ask which treatments should be covered by universal basic insurance and which by private voluntary insurance. We argue that both cost effectiveness and prevalence are important if the government wants to...

This paper introduces a tractable model of health insurance with both moral hazard and adverse selection. We show that government sponsored universal basic insurance should cover treatments with the biggest adverse selection problems. Treatments not covered by basic insurance can be covered on...

Health expenditures as a share of GDP have more than tripled over the last half century. A common conjecture is that this is primarily a consequence of rising real per capita income, which more than doubled over the same period. We investigate this hypothesis empirically by instrumenting for...

Consumers, when buying health insurance, do not know the exact value of each treatment that they buy coverage for. This leads them to overvalue some treatments and undervalue others. We show that the insurance market cannot correct these mistakes. This causes research labs to overinvest in...

Patient mobility is a key issue in the EU who recently passed a new law on patients' right to EU-wide provider choice. In this paper we use a Hotelling model with two regions that differ in technology to study the impact of patient mobility on health care quality, health care financing and...

Under Medicare Part D, senior citizens choose prescription drug insurance offred by numerous private insurers. We examine non-poor enrollees' actions in 2006 and 2007 using panel data. Our sample reduced overspending by $298 on average, with gains by 81% of them. The greatest improvements were...

Across African countries, prevention policies are unrelated to the prevalence of HIV/AIDS and, even in countries in which they were successful, these policies are often unstable or reversed. To explain these two puzzles, we propose a simple political economy model that examines how prevention...

We provide evidence from a large-scale field experiment on the causal effects of audit rules on compliance in a market for long-term care. In this setting care should be provided quickly and, therefore, the gatekeeper introduced ex-post auditing. Our results do not show significant effects of...

This paper studies the effects of various audit regimes, differing in the degree of control and the presence of performance incentives, on behavior of care providers filing applications for providing long-term care services to patients. We present evidence from a large-scale field experiment in...