We examine whether and to what extent consolidation in the U.S. health insurance industry is leading to higher employer-sponsored insurance premiums. We make use of a proprietary, panel dataset of employer-sponsored healthplans enrolling over 10 million Americans annually between 1998 and 2006...

Implicit taxes in Social Security, which measure Social Security contributions net of benefits accrued as a percentage of earnings, tend to increase over the life cycle. In this paper, we examine the effects of three potential policy changes on implicit Social Security tax rates: extending the...

Recent advances in the examination of efficiency gains from dynamic tax reforms have used simulation models to isolate intragenerational and/or intergenerational effects. Important considerations having to do with uncertainty or capital market imperfections are frequently missing from such a...

A positive correlation between insurance coverage and ex post risk can be an indicator for private information in insurance markets. However, this test fails if agents have heterogeneous risk attitudes. We propose a new test that conditions on unobserved types of individuals who differ in their...

Whether personal income tax deductions are appropriate refinements to the concept of income or unwarranted tax expenditures continues to be the subject of debate. The casualty loss and medical expense deductions are frequently justified on the ground that ability to pay is reduced by largely...

I use the Medicare Part D prescription drug insurance market to examine the dynamics of firm interaction with consumers on an insurance exchange. Enrollment data show that consumers face switching frictions leading to inertia in plan choice, and a regression discontinuity design indicates...

The majority of private health insurance in the U.S. is administered or issued by for-profit insurers, but little is known about how for-profit status affects outcomes. We find that plausibly exogenous increases in local for-profit market share induced by conversions of Blue Cross and Blue...

We analyze consumer demand and model the effect of pricing regulation under imperfect competition using data from the Massachusetts health insurance exchange. We identify consumer demand using coarse insurer pricing strategies. There is substantial heterogeneity in preferences by consumer type,...

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...

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...