In this paper I estimate the impact of Medicaid on children's health care utilization and their subsequent health outcomes. I estimate the causal effects using a Regression Discontinuity (RD) design. I exploit the discontinuity generated by Medicaid's eligibility rule, based on family income, on...

This paper proposes a new approach to the measurement of equality of opportunity in health, based on the path independent Atkinson index of equality. The proposed decomposition is applied both to the ex-ante and the ex-post methodologies recently adopted by the literature. The approach is...

In this paper we analyze asymmetric information in the (private) disability insurance, which has not been analyzed before in the literature, but covers one of the most important risks faced by individuals in modern society, namely the loss of human capital. We show that there is asymmetric...

The Medicare program, which provides insurance coverage to the elderly in the United States, does not protect them fully against high out-of-pocket costs. For this reason private supplementary insurance, named Medigap, has been available to cover Medicare gaps. This paper studies how Medigap...

We examined the relationship between unobserved risk preferences and four insurance purchase decisions: health Medigap insurance, long-term insurance, life insurance and annuity. Standard economic theory assumes that individuals take decision over a set of risky domains according to their own...

In two important recent papers, Finkelstein and McGarry [25] and Finkelstein and Poterba [28] propose a new test for asymmetric information in insurance markets that considers explicitly unobserved heterogeneity in insurance demand. In this paper we propose an alternative implementation of the...

We study the impact of the Fukushima disaster on people’s mental wellâ€Âbeing in another industrialized country, more than 5000 miles distant. The meltdown significantly increased environmental concerns by 20% among the German population. Subsequent drastic policy action...

This paper exploits rich SOEP microdata to analyze state-level variation in health care utilization in Germany. Unlike most studies in the field of the Small Area Variation (SAV) literature, our approach allows us to net out a large array of individual-level and state-level factors that may...

High school dropout is an important policy issue and its determinants are a longstanding interest of economics. However, very little is known on the roles of noncognitive traits in influencing school dropoutdecisions. We employ voluntary forgone health care as a proxy for the underlying...

This study comprehensively assesses the immediate effects of extreme weather conditions and high concentrations of ambient air pollution on population health. For Germany and the years 1999 to 2008, we link the universe of all 170 million hospital admissions, along with all 8 million deaths,...