This paper argues that climate change poses two distinct, if related, sets of challenges for poor rural households: challenges related to the increasing frequency and severity of weather shocks and challenges related to long-term shifts in temperature, rainfall patterns, water availability, and...

The aging of the farmer population has led to concern about a shortage of beginning farmers and ranchers. This study investigates the impact of health insurance coverage and participation in government and private insurance programs on off-farm labor allocation decisions of beginning...

About two-thirds of U.S. farm households are employed off the farm. Off-farm sources represent 85 percent of the income earned by the average farm household and have turned into their main source of health insurance coverage. Farmers receive various government farm program payments, including...

The existing literature provides evidence that public opinion and attitudes often affect public policy. However, little is known on how public policy might affect public attitudes and norms. I present new evidence on this topic by using age-based health insurance policies in the United States as...

Penalty mandates are used in many countries to encourage people to purchase health insurance. But are they effective? We use a large administrative dataset for a 10% random sample of all Australian tax-filers to study how people respond to a step-wise age-based mandate, and whether this has...

States are increasingly resorting to raising the minimum wage to boost the earnings of those at the bottom of the income distribution. In this paper, we examine the effects of minimum wage increases on the health of low-educated Hispanic women, who constitute a growing part of the U.S. labor...

This paper examines the impacts of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – which substantially increased insurance coverage through regulations, mandates, subsidies, and Medicaid expansions – on behaviors related to future health risks after three years. Using data from the Behavioral Risk Factor...

Decision-making in the realm of health behaviors, such as smoking or drinking, is influenced both by biological factors, such as genetic predispositions, as well as environmental factors, such as financial liquidity and health insurance status. We show how the choice of smoking after a...

In countries with dual public and private healthcare systems, individuals are often incentivised to purchase private health insurance through subsidies and penalty. We use administrative data from Australia to study how high-income earners respond on both the intensive and extensive margins to...

This paper proposes a test for the existence and the degree of contagious presenteeism and negative externalities in sickness insurance schemes. First, we theoretically decompose moral hazard into shirking and contagious presenteeism behavior. Then we derive testable conditions for reduced...