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...

This paper provides an analytical framework and uses data from the US and Germany to test for the existence of contagious presenteeism and negative externalities in sickness insurance schemes. The first part exploits high-frequency Google Flu data and the staggered implementation of U.S. sick...