Medical expenditure risk can pose a major threat to living standards. We derive decomposable measures of catastrophic medical expenditure risk from reference-dependent utility with loss aversion. We propose a quantile regression based method of estimating risk exposure from cross-section data...

This paper studies a market for a medical product in which there is perfect competition among health insurers, while the good is sold by a monopolist. Individuals differ in their severity of illness and there is ex post moral hazard. We consider two regimes: one in which insurers use coinsurance...

Innovation is part idea generation and part development. We build a model of “innovating-bydoing,” whereby ideas come to practitioners. Successful innovation requires that practitioners’ideas be developed through costly effort. Our model nests existing theories of laboratory researchand...

This paper investigates the short-run impact of public insurance expansion under the Affordable Care Act on out-of-pocket medical spending (OOP) and risk exposure among low-income, eligible households as well as the incidence of the cost of providing insurance. Using data from the Medical...

In the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments had to rely on Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions in their struggle against the spread of the virus. The stringency of the lockdowns differed across space and time as governments had to adjust their strategy dynamically to the country-specific...

Using the data on maintenance expenditures and self-assessed house value, I separate the measure of individual housing stock and house prices, and use these data for testing whether nondurable consumption and housing are characterized by intratemporal nonseparability in households' preferences....

We exploit the unexpected announcement of an immediate, temporary VAT cut in Germany in the second half of 2020 as a natural experiment to study the spending response to unconventional fiscal policy. We use survey and scanner data on households’ consumption expenditures and their perceived...

This paper examines how households adjusted their consumption behavior in response to COVID-19 infection risk during the early phase of the pandemic. We use a monthly consumption survey specifically designed by the German Statistical Office covering the second wave of COVID-19 infections from...

This paper focuses on whether households facing economic scarcity tend to change consumption priorities as measured by the share of spending on necessity goods relative to luxury goods in a large national supermarket chain in Israel for the years 2011–2018. Based on detailed weekly revenue...

Rising income inequality since the 1980s in the United States has generated a substantial increase in saving by the top of the income distribution, which we call the saving glut of the rich. The saving glut of the rich has been as large as the global saving glut, and it has not been associated...