The long run price elasticity of healthcare spending is critically important to estimating the cost of provision. However, temporary randomized controlled trials may be confounded by transitory effects. This paper shows evidence of a "deadline effect" - a spike in spending in the final year of...

Do households value access to free health insurance when making labor supply decisions? We answer this question using the introduction of universal health insurance in Mexico, the Seguro Popular (SP), in 2002. The SP targeted individuals not covered by Social Security and broke the link between...

We investigate the properties of health insurance demand in Burkina Faso, where we offered poor households a voluntary health insurance product at half the usual price. The targeting procedure we implemented delivers a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, which identifies the price elasticity...

Recent healthcare reforms have sought to increase efficiency by introducing managed care (MC) while respecting consumer preferences by admitting choice between MC and conventional care. This article proposes an institutional change designed to let German consumers choose between the two settings...

Recent evidence on nonlinear insurance contracts finds that individuals react to the embedded dynamic incentives by changing health care utilization. However, with field data it is difficult to keep the spot price among individuals constant while systematically varying the future price. To do...

Despite widespread exposure to substantial medical expenditure risk in low-income populations, health insurance enrollment is typically low. This is puzzling from the perspective of expected utility theory. To help explain it, this paper introduces a decomposition of the stated willingness to...

Long-term care (LTC) gains attention in ageing societies. Making LTC insurance affordable for the wide public is a primary objective of politics and insurance companies alike. Germany's LTC insurance, introduced 25 years ago, is split in two branches, a private and a public one. The per-capita...

We analyze short-term effects of free hospitalization insurance for the poorest quintile of the population in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. First, we exploit that eligibility is based on an exogenous poverty score threshold and apply a regression discontinuity design. Second, we...

In this paper we study the causal effect of a large expansion of publicly provided health insurance on children's academic performance using the case of Mexico. In general, access to free health insurance could improve education outcomes directly by making household members healthier or...

Health shocks are among the most important unprotected risks for microfinance clients, but the take-up of micro health insurance typically remains limited. This pa- per attributes low enrollment rates to a social dilemma. Our theory is that in jointly liable groups, insurance is a public good....