Many employers have implemented dependent verification (DV) programs, which aim to reduce employee benefits costs by ensuring that ineligible persons are not enrolled in their health plan as dependents. We evaluate a DV program using a panel of health plan enrollment data from a large,...

Definitions can matter, and Don Fullerton and Michael Geruso argue that proponents of social security privatization mean a host of different things by "privatization." They point out that many of the gains from privatization seen by economists like Martin Feldstein and Laurence Kotlikoff owe to...

In recent years many employers, both in the private and public sectors, have implemented dependent verification (DV) programs, which aim to reduce employee benefits costs by ensuring that ineligible persons are not enrolled in their health plan as dependents. However, little is known about their...

This paper quantities the power of socioeconomic and demographic characteristics to account for black-white disparities in life expectancy in the US. While many studies have investigated the linkages between race, SES, and mortality, previous studies have almost universally reported results in...

In many markets, including the new U.S. Exchanges, health insurance plans are paid by risk-adjusted capitation, in some markets combined with reinsurance and other payment mechanisms. This paper proposes three metrics for analyzing the insurer incentives embedded in these complex payment...

The debate over privatizing Medicare stems from a fundamental disagreement about whether privatization would primarily generate consumer surplus for individuals or producer surplus for insurance companies and health care providers. This paper investigates this question by studying an existing...

Some experimental participants are averse to compound lotteries: they prefer simple lotteries that depend on only one random event, even when the simple lotteries offer lower expected value. This paper proposes that many behavioral “investments” represent more compound risk for poorer...

Even compared with neighbouring countries, latrine use is especially uncommon in India. How might caste - historically associated with sanitation inequality - interact with government sanitation policy? Using data from Rajasthan state, we investigate the effect of caste-based reservations for...

Earlier studies have documented an “identifiable victim effect”-- people donate more to help individual people than to groups. Evidence suggests that this is in part due to an emotional reaction to the identified recipients, who generate more sympathy. However, stereotype research has shown...