We study the moral hazard effects of the drug copayment threshold in Finland using detailed prescription drug purchase data. The analysis reveals that the average drug costs increase discontinuously by 17% at the threshold above which out-of-pocket drug costs decrease substantially. Our results...

We determine the optimal health policy mix when the average utility of patients increases with the supply of drugs available in a therapeutic class. Health risk coverage rely on two instruments, copayment and reference pricing, that affect the supported risk composed by health expenses and...

In the European Union, medicines are regulated products subject to both single market (e.g., regional exhaustion of property rights) and country specific health care regulations (e.g., medicines pricing). This gives rise to parallel trade (PT), a phenomenon that takes place when a patented...

We provide a theoretical framework to contribute to the current debate regarding the tendency of pharmaceutical companies to direct their R&D toward marketing products that are "follow-on" drugs of already existing drugs, rather than toward the development of breakthrough drugs. We construct a...

Policy makers use reference pricing to curb pharmaceutical expenditures by reducing coverage of expensive branded drugs. In a theoretical analysis we show that the net effect of reference pricing is generally ambiguous when accounting for entry by generic producers. Reference pricing shifts...

Through changing the connection between insurance and employment, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has affected people's incentives to obtain education. We employ a triple-difference strategy comparing counties with different levels of uninsurance pre-ACA and in states with different Medicaid...

The effect of insurance expansions on the distribution of health status is still a matter we know little about. This paper draws upon new measures of pure health inequality and mobility in health which accommodates categorical data to understand how an expansion of public insurance affects both...

We use difference-in-difference methods and data from the 2008 Survey of Income and Program Participation to test whether the ACA dependent care provision is associated with family structure and public program participation among young adults. Findings indicate that implementation of the...

In this study, we test whether the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) dependent care provision is associated with young adults' propensity to be in the armed forces and to have military health insurance. We use a difference-in-difference (DD) approach, comparing the outcomes of young adults targeted by...