While the traditional role of insurers is to provide protection against idiosyncratic risks of individuals, insurers themselves face substantial uncertainties due to aggregate shocks. To prevent insurers from passing through aggregate risks to consumers, governments have increasingly adopted...

Using local natural disasters as a quasi-experimental setting, we show that heightened distress risk in shocked firms drives both these firms and their unshocked competitors to cut profit margins by about 0.8 percentage points. These reductions stem from predatory pricing, inventory liquidation,...

We study the spatial expansion of banks in response to banking deregulation in the 1980s and 90s. During this period, large banks expanded rapidly, mostly by adding new branches in new locations, while many small banks exited. We document that large banks sorted into the densest markets, but...

We examine how health insurance expansions affect the entry and location decisions of health care clinics. Exploiting county-level changes in insurance coverage following the Affordable Care Act and 1,721 retail clinic entries and exits, we find that local increases in insurance coverage do not...

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) changed incentives for individual and employer-sponsored insurance. Using unique small group market (SGM) data with detailed claims and enrollment information, we analyze the welfare gains across households in the SGM from alternative formulations of ACA health...

Existing research on selection in insurance markets focuses on how adverse selection distorts prices and misallocates products across people. This ignores the distributional consequences of who pays the higher prices. In this paper, we show that the distributional incidence depends on the...

In this paper, we provide a suite of tools for empirical market design, including optimal nonlinear pricing in intensive-margin consumer demand, as well as a broad class of related adverse-selection models. Despite significant data limitations, we are able to derive informative bounds on demand...

We study trade-offs faced by multiple-system operators (MSOs), the gatekeepers in the provision of internet service, when setting prices and quality for internet access and TV service. In response to improvements in over-the-top video (OTT), MSOs choose between accommodating OTT to share in the...