This paper investigates consumer switching costs in the context of health insurance markets, where adverse selection is a potential concern. Though previous work has studied these phenomena in isolation, they interact in a way that directly impacts market outcomes and consumer welfare. Our...

Moral hazard and adverse selection create inefficiencies in private health insurance markets and understanding the relative importance of each factor is critical for policy. We use claims data from a large firm to isolate moral hazard from plan selection. Previous studies have attempted to...

Risk adjustment of payments to health plans is fundamental to regulated competition among private insurers, which serves as the basis of national health policy in many countries. To date, estimation and evaluation of a risk adjustment model has been a two-step process. In a first step, the...

The Affordable Care Act's taxes, subsidies, and regulations significantly alter terms of trade in both goods and factor markets. We use a multi-sector (intra-national) trade model to predict and quantify consequences of the Affordable Care Act for the incidence of health insurance coverage and...

This paper uses data on health insurance choices by employees of Harvard University to examine the effect of alternative pricing rules on market equilibrium. In the mid-1990s, Harvard moved from a system of subsidizing more expensive insurance to a system of contributing an equal amount to each...

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...

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

In the Medicare Advantage (MA) market, private health insurers compete to offer plans with the most attractive premium and benefit package. Medicare provides a subsidy, based on a "benchmark payment rate", for each Medicare beneficiary a plan enrolls. We investigate how this subsidy, the primary...

This paper analyzes pharmaceutical pricing between and within countries to achieve second best static and dynamic efficiency. We distinguish countries with and without universal insurance, because insurance undermines patients' price sensitivity, potentially leading to prices above second-best...

Our paper documents the large labor market wedges created by taxes, subsidies, and regulations included in the Affordable Care Act. The law changes terms of trade in both goods and factor markets for firms offering health insurance coverage. We use a multi-sector (intra-national) trade model to...