The universal moral public good of fighting poverty is provided by both public and private transfers. Efficient public transfers do not crowd out giving because of the particular motives for it. Understanding these effects is necessary for both explaining aid and choosing policy. This analysis...

Colombia has the highest number of internally displaced refugees in the world after Syria. The decade-long ongoing armed conflict between the Colombian police and the armed forces, paramilitaries, and guerilla groups has caused 5.7 million people--more than ten percent of the population-- to...

Young people with private health insurance sometimes transition to the public health insurance safety net after they get sick, but popular sources of cross-sectional data obscure how frequently these transitions occur. We use longitudinal data on almost all hospital visits in New York from 1995...

Young people with private health insurance sometimes transition to the public health insurance safety net after they get sick, but popular sources of cross-sectional data obscure how frequently these transitions occur. We use longitudinal data on almost all hospital visits in New York from 1995...

At the end of 1998, China launched a government-run mandatory insurance program, the Urban Employee Basic Medical Insurance (UEBMI), to replace the previous medical insurance system. Using the UEBMI reform in China as a natural experiment, this study identify variations in patient cost sharing...

Germany introduced a new mandatory insurance scheme for long-term care in 1995. From a budgetary perspective family care is a cost-saving alternative to formal home care and to stationary nursing care. Thus, one of the goals of the insurance is to support informal care provided by family...

This paper studies search and prices in the Medigap insurance market. Using data on market shares, insurer characteristics, and plan prices, we estimate to what extent prices can be explained by search and product differentiation. In our model, consumers search across Medigap insurers for prices...

This paper explores the effects of public health insurance expansions on hospitals’ decisions to adopt medical technology. Specifically, we test whether the expansion of Medicaid eligibility for pregnant women during the 1980s and 1990s affects hospitals’ decisions to adopt neonatal...

We examine the impact of U.S. states’ adoption of the partnership long-term care (LTC) insurance program on households’ purchases of private coverage. This program increases benefits of privately insuring via a higher asset threshold for Medicaid eligibility for LTC coverage, and targets...

Building on the findings of Lin and Prince (2013), we analyze several additional potential determinants of response to the partnership long-term care (PLTC) program, in addition to wealth. The determinants we consider are bequest motives, financial literacy, and program awareness. We find mild...