Defining optimal capital requirements for health insurers is a matter of interest for policy-makers. They determine the insolvency probability of health insurers and the minimum number of enrolees in order to keep insolvency under control. In this paper we develop a methodology for estimating...

We examine whether the Colombian government, when instituting and expanding social programs in the early nineties, inadvertently created incentives for people to become informal. We use data from repeated cross-sections of the Colombian Household Survey for periods before and after...

We evaluate, in terms of efficiency and selection incentives, four different ex post risk sharing mechanisms. Outlier risk sharing (ORS), proportional risk sharing (PRS), risk sharing for high costs (RSHC) and risk sharing for high risks. Our results suggest that the best mechanism in terms of...

Risk adjustment is vital in health policy design. Risk adjustment defines the annual capitation payments to health insurers and is a key determinant of insolvency risk for health insurers. In this study we compare the current risk adjustment formula used by Colombia's Ministry of Health and...

We compare two genetic testing regulations, Disclosure Duty (DD) and Consent Law (CL), in an environment where individuals choose to take a genetic test or not. DD forces agents to reveal the test results to their insurers, resulting in a discrimination risk. CL allows agents to withhold that...

Personalized medicine is still in its infancy, with costly genetic tests providing Little actionable information in terms of efficient prevention decisions. As a consequence, few people undertake these tests currently, and health insurance contracts pool all agents irrespective of their genetic...

We introduce new risk groups to a standard capitation formula and evaluate risk selection incentives of insurers. The study uses a unique data set of almost 24 million affiliates to Government's mandatory health insurance system. This data set is very rich in the sense of reporting all claims...

This paper studies the design of health insurance with ex post moral hazard, when there is imperfect competition in the market for the medical product. Various scenarios, such as monopoly pricing, price negotiation or horizontal differentiation are considered. The insurance contract specifies...

In many developing countries, the COVID-19 pandemic has spread much faster and wider than the number of detected cases implies. By combining data from 59,770 RT-PCR tests on mostly asymptomatic individuals with administrative data on all detected cases, we capture the spread and dynamics of the...

We evaluate the impact of a price cap regulation implemented in the Colombian pharmaceutical market between 2011 and 2014. To do so, we take advantage of a unique data set where we observe three sources of variation: i) differences across eighteen groups in the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical...