Achieving universal health coverage, including financial risk protection and access to quality essential health-care services, is one of the main Sustainable Development Goals. In low-income countries, innovative and affordable health financing systems are key to realize these goals. This paper...

Poverty in low-income countries is usually measured with large and infrequent household surveys. A challenge is to find methods to measure poverty more frequently. The objective of this study is to test a method for predicting poverty, based upon a statistical model utilizing consumption surveys...

Health insurance status can change over the life cycle for exogenous reasons (e.g. Medicare for the elders, PPACA for younger agents, termination of coverage at retirement in employer-provided plans). Durability of the health capital, endogenous mortality and morbidity, as well as backward...

We develop a pair of risk measures, health and mortality delta, for the universe of life and health insurance products. A life-cycle model of insurance choice simplifies to replicating the optimal health and mortality delta through a portfolio of insurance products. We estimate the model to...

In this paper we analyze the impact of a randomized information package on the understanding and uptake of community based health insurance. The information package consists of a detailed brochure which is distributed to households through home visits, a video also presented in people's homes...

Using data on over 57,000 low-income tax filers, we estimate the effect of Medicaid access on the propensity of households to save or repay debt from their tax refunds. We instrument for Medicaid access using variation in state eligibility rules. We find substantial heterogeneity across...

A motivation for increasing health insurance coverage is to improve health outcomes for impacted populations. However, health insurance coverage may alternatively increase risky health behaviors due to ex ante moral hazard, and past research on this issue has led to mixed conclusions. This paper...

Germany introduced a new mandatory insurance for long-term care in 1995 as part of its social security system. It replaced a system based on means tested social welfare. Benefits from the long-term care insurance are not means tested and depend on the required level of care. The insurance...

Historically, children from wealthier families are more likely to have health insurance than children from poorer families on average. However, the relationship between family income and health insurance is non-linear, as children near the Federal Poverty Line (FPL) are less likely to be insured...