Healthcare payers try to reduce costs by promoting the use of cheaper generic drugs. We show strong interrelations in drug prescriptions between the inpatient and outpatient sectors by using a large administrative dataset from Austria. Patients with prior hospital visits have a significantly...

For more than 25 years, the Social Security Trust Fund has been projected to run out of money in 2033 (give or take a few years), potentially causing benefits to be severely reduced in the absence of corrective legislative action. Today (February 2024), projections are made by the Social...

The Social Security "full retirement age" (FRA) is the age at which retirement income benefits are available without reduction for early commencement. Presently, that age is 67 for those born in 1960 or later. This paper is about the unfair and unnecessary threat to reduce Social Security...

he COVID-19 pandemic calls for a collective response at the global and regional level. Otherwise, some nations may be left behind and the potential for the contagion to return remains high. As advanced regional blocs, the EU and ASEAN have a major responsibility to their members for coordinating...

Disability rolls have escalated in developed nations over the last 40 years. The UK, however, stands out because the numbers on these benefits stopped rising when a welfare reform was introduced that integrated disability benefits with unemployment insurance (UI). This policy reform improved job...

Estimates of social insurance pension wealth are available for a number of Western economies, including Austria for the year 2017. Such wealth may be compared with conventional wealth in terms of size and distribution and when we add such estimates to measures of wealth in the conventional...

I study a model of a representative individual who has a motive for leaving bequests and is at risk of needing long-term care in old age. I assume - as is typical for OECD countries - that the individual is not fully insured against this risk. Moreover, at realization the individual is unable to...

This paper exploits variation resulting from a series of federal and state Medicaid expansions between 1979 and 2014 to estimate the effects of child's access to public health insurance on labor market outcomes of parents. The results imply that extended Medicaid eligibility of children leads to...

We study the effect of the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion on coverage dynamics following the sudden loss of coverage from an employer plan. This analysis leverages novel administrative data capturing monthly health insurance coverage for the U.S. population. Using these data, we...

I investigate the relationship between physician pay, C-section use, and infant health, using vital statistics data and newly collected data on Medicaid payments to physicians. First, I confirm past results - when Medicaid pays doctors relatively more for C-sections, they perform them more...