A ubiquitous form of government intervention in insurance markets is to provide compulsory, but partial, public insurance coverage and to allow voluntary purchases of supplementary insurance on the private market. Yet we know little about the effects of such programs on total insurance coverage...

Moral hazard--the tendency to change behavior when the cost of that behavior will be borne by others--is a particularly tricky question when considering health care. Kenneth J. Arrow's seminal 1963 paper on this topic (included in this volume) was one of the first to explore the implication of...

"Standard theories of insurance, dating from Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976), stress the role of adverse selection in explaining the decision to purchase insurance. In these models, higher risk people buy full or near-full insurance, while lower risk people buy less complete coverage, if they buy...