This paper examines the reasons behind the low rates of participation in old age pension programs in developing countries. Using a large set of harmonized household surveys from Latin America we assess how much of the low participation can be explained by involuntary rationing out of jobs with...

Over the past few decades, policy makers have considered employer mandates as a strategy for stemming the tide of declining health insurance coverage. In this paper we examine the long term effects of the only employer health insurance mandate that has ever been enforced in the United States,...

A large body of research documents that the 2010 dependent coverage mandate of the Affordable Care Act was responsible for significantly increasing health insurance coverage among young adults. No prior research has examined whether sexual minority young adults also benefitted from the dependent...

Each year, 10,000 individuals die in alcohol-impaired traffic accidents in the United States, while psychoactive drugs are involved in 20% of all fatal traffic accidents. We investigate whether state parity laws for substance use disorder (SUD) treatment have the unintended benefit of reducing...

Credence goods markets – like for health care or repair services – with their informational asymmetries between sellers and customers are prone to fraudulent behavior of sellers and resulting market inefficiencies. We present the first model that considers both diagnostic uncertainty of...

One of the main purposes of recent healthcare reform (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act - ACA) in the U.S. is to enable Americans to make more productive use of their time. We examine how the ACA's dependent care coverage mandate (DCM) affected young adults' time allocation. Based on...

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...

Rural households in Ethiopia are exposed to a variety of covariate and idiosyncratic risks. In 2005, the Ethiopian government introduced the Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) and in 2011 launched the Community Based Health Insurance Scheme (CBHI). This paper analyses the interaction between...

Sick workers in many countries receive sick pay during their illness-related absences from the workplace. In several countries, the social security system insures firms against their workers' sickness absences. However, this insurance may create moral hazard problems for firms, leading to the...