We provide a comparison of salient organizational features of primary markets for foreign government debt over the very long run. We focus on output, quality control, information provision, competition, pricing, charging, and signaling. We find that the market setup experienced a radical...

A liquidity-constrained entrepreneur needs to raise capital to finance a business activity that may cause injuries to third parties -- the tort victims. Taking the level of borrowing as fixed, the entrepreneur finances the activity with senior (secured) debt in order to shield assets from the...

Whereas the literature evaluating the effect of tort reforms has focused on reported incurred losses, this paper examines the long run effects using a comprehensive sample by state of individual firms writing medical malpractice insurance from 1984-2003. The long run effects of reforms are...

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...