This study investigates whether minimum wage increases in the United States affect an important non-market outcome: worker health. To study this question, we use data on lesser-skilled workers from the 1993-2014 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Surveys coupled with differences-in-differences...

We examine how substance use disorder (SUD) treatment providers respond to private health insurance expansions induced by state equal coverage ('parity') laws for SUD treatment. We use data on the near universe of specialty SUD treatment providers in the United States between 1997 and 2010 in an...

In this study we examine the impact of a value-based insurance design (V-BID) program implemented between 2010 and 2013 at a large public employer in the state of Oregon. The program substantially increased cost-sharing, specifically copayments and coinsurance, for several healthcare services...

This paper investigates competition between health insurance companies under different financing regulations. We consider two alternatives advanced in recent German health care reform discussions: competition by contribution rates (health contributions) and by fees (health premia). We find that...

Social protection systems in developing countries are typically composed of a bundle of benefits, the major ones being health insurance and pensions. Benefit bundling may increase informality and decrease welfare. Indeed, if some of the benefits are valued at substantially less than their cost,...

We study the incentives for hospitals to provide quality and expend cost-reducing effort when their budgets are soft, i.e., the payer may cover deficits or confiscate surpluses. The basic set up is a Hotelling model with two hospitals that differ in location and face demand uncertainty, where...

We analyse the effect of competition on quality in hospital markets with regulated prices, considering both the effect of (i) introducing competition (monopoly versus competition) and (ii) increasing competition through lower transportation costs (increased substitutability) or a higher number...

Using a randomized field experiment, we show that health care specialists cream-skim patients by their expected profitability. In the German two-tier system, outpatient reimbursement rates for both public and private insurance are centrally determined but are more than twice as high for the...

We study theoretically and empirically how consumers in an individual private longterm health insurance market with front-loaded contracts respond to newly mandated portability requirements of their old-age provisions. To foster competition, effective 2009, the German legislature made the...

To equalize differences in health plan premiums due to differences in risk pools, the German legislature introduced a simple Risk Adjustment Scheme (RAS) based on age, gender and disability status in 1994. In addition, effective 1996, consumers gained the freedom to choose among hundreds of...