We study how inertia interacts with market power and adverse selection in managed competition health insurance markets. We use consumer-level data to estimate a model of the California ACA exchange, in which four firms dominate the market and risk adjustment is in place to manage selection. We...

Algorithms increasingly assist consumers in making their purchase decisions across a variety of markets; yet little is known about how humans interact with algorithmic advice. We examine how algorithmic, personalized information affects consumer choice among complex financial products using data...

Health insurance plans increasingly pay for expenses only beyond a large annual deductible. This paper explores the implications of deductibles that reset over shorter timespans. We develop a model of insurance demand between two actuarially equivalent deductible policies, in which one...

Several past studies have found health risk to be negatively correlated with the probability of voluntary health insurance. This is contrary to what one would expect from standard textbook models of adverse selection and moral hazard. The two most common explanations to the counter-intuitive...

Most non-elderly Americans purchase insurance through their employers, which sponsor a limited number of plans. We estimate how much employees would be willing to pay for the right to apply their employer subsidy to the plan of their choosing. We make use of a proprietary dataset containing...

We study the Medicare Part D prescription drug insurance program as a bellwether for designs of private, non-mandatory health insurance markets that control adverse selection and assure adequate access and coverage. We model Part D enrollment and plan choice assuming a discrete dynamic decision...

The central role that employers play in financing health care is a distinctive feature of the U.S. health care system, and the provision of health insurance through the workplace has important implications well beyond its role as source of health care financing. In this paper, we consider the...

Although the vast majority of Americans have private health insurance, researchers focus almost exclusively on public provision. Data on the private insurance sector is extremely difficult to obtain because health insurance contracts are complex, renegotiated annually, and not subject to...

Subsidies for health insurance for chronically ill, high-cost individuals may increase coverage in the broader population by improving the functioning of insurance markets. In this paper, we assess an historical example of a policy intervention of this sort, the extension of Medicare to the...

The obesity rate in the United States has risen significantly in the past few decades. While a number of economic causes for the rise in obesity have been explored, little attention has been on the role of health insurance per se. This paper examines obesity in the context of a model where...