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,...

This paper studies how better access to public health insurance affects infant mortality during pandemics. Our analysis combines cross-state variation in mandated eligibility for Medicaid with two influenza pandemics — the 1957-58 "Asian Flu" pandemic and the 1968-69 "Hong Kong Flu" — that...

Indian government launched the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY), a national health insurance scheme, in 2008 that provides cashless health services to poor households in India. We evaluate the impact of RSBY on RSBY beneficiary households' (average treatment impact on the treated)...

In India, 52–98 million people live in urban slums, and 59% of slums are "non-notified" or lack legal recognition by the government. In this paper, we use data on 2,901 slums from four waves of the National Sample Survey (NSS) spanning almost 20 years to test the hypothesis that non-notified...

This analysis uses data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) and the Survey on Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) to assess the effect of ageing and health on the life satisfaction of the oldest old (defined as 75 and older). We observe a U-shaped relationship between age...

We investigate to what extent workplace unionisation protects workers from external shocks as predicted by models of implicit contracts. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a plausibly exogenous shock hitting the whole economy, we compare workers who worked in unionised and non-unionised workplaces...

We use a linear probability model with interactions and a switching probit model (SPM) to estimate heterogeneous effects of Medicaid expansions on Medicaid take-up, private insurance coverage and crowd-out. Specifically, we estimate: i) LATEs; ii) ATETs for the currently eligible; and iii) ATETs...

This paper estimates the effects of early interventions in the Swedish sickness insurance system. The aim of the interventions is to screen and, further to, rehabilitate sick listed individuals. We find that the early interventions – in contrast to what is expected – increase the inflow into...

This paper provides field evidence on (a) how price framing affects consumers' decision to switch health insurance plans and (b) how the price elasticity of demand for health insurance can be influenced by policymakers through simple regulatory efforts. In 2009, in order to foster competition...

We examine the early effects of U.S. state Medicaid expansions under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on substance use disorder (SUD) treatment utilization. We couple administrative data on admissions to specialty SUD treatment and prescriptions for medications used to treat SUDs in outpatient...