We analyze the role of search frictions in the market for commercial health insurance. Frictions increase the cost of insurance by enabling insurers to set price above marginal cost, and by creating incentives for inefficiently high levels of marketing. Frictions also lead to price dispersion...

Early choice of occupation could be a critical factor in successful aging and this information may pave the way to developing more effective workplace and public policies to improve health in older ages

There are very large literatures in public health and economics on the effects of workplace smoking bans, with most studies relying on cross-sectional variation. We provide new quasi-experimental evidence on the effects of workplace bans by using the differential timing of adoption of over 100...

We construct and test a new model of employer-provided health insurance provision in the presence of adverse selection in the health insurance market. In our model, employers cannot observe the health of their employees, but can decide whether to offer insurance. Employees sort themselves among...

This study analyzes health plan choices of retirees in an employer-sponsored health benefits program that resembles "premium support" models proposed for Medicare. In this program, out-of-pocket premiums depend on when an individual retired and his or her years of service as of that date. Since...

We examine the impact of OSHA enforcement on company compliance with agency regulations in the manufacturing sector, with a unique plant-level data set of inspection and compliance behavior during 1972-1983, the first twelve years of the agency operation. The analysis suggests that, for an...

Workplace wellness programs cover over 50 million workers and are intended to reduce medical spending, increase productivity, and improve well-being. Yet, limited evidence exists to support these claims. We designed and implemented a comprehensive workplace wellness program for a large employer...

The use of incentives to encourage healthy behaviors is increasingly widespread, but we have little evidence about how best to structure these programs. We explore how different incentive designs affect behavior on the extensive and intensive margins through an experiment offering incentives to...

We estimate the role of firms in worker health care utilization. Using linked administrative data on Austrian workers from 1998-2018, we exploit mobility between firms to estimate how much a firm contributes to worker-level differences in utilization in a setting with non-employer provided...

We study habit formation in annual biometric health screenings using a field experiment that randomly assigned financial incentives to 4,799 employees over three years. Completing the first screening raised subsequent screenings by 32.4-36.0 percentage points (84%-90%) annually. Habit formation...