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...

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....

This paper identifies the effect of health insurance on workers' compensation (WC) filing for young adults by implementing a regression discontinuity design using WC medical claims data from Texas. The results suggest health insurance factors into the decision to have WC pay for discretionary...

This paper analyzes whether Mexico's de-facto non-contributory health insurance program Seguro Popular had an effect on the risk of miscarriage during pregnancy. Using data on pregnancies over the 2004-08 period from the 2009 round of the National Survey on Demographic Dynamics (ENADID), and...

The health landscape in Latin America and the Caribbean is changing quickly. The region is undergoing a demographic and epidemiological transition in which health problems are highly concentrated on noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). In light of this, the region faces two main challenges: (1)...

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...

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...

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...