Exploiting unique administrative longitudinal data sets on medical services provided to mothers before- and after- delivery, we estimate the causal effects of two major distinct parental leave reforms on maternal health outcomes, over a period of 5 years postpartum. The health outcomes are...

Did Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act affect the course of the COVID-19 pandemic? We answer this question using a regression discontinuity design for counties near the borders of states that expanded Medicaid with states that did not. Relevant covariates change continuously across...

Heterogeneous effects are prevalent in many economic settings. As the functional form between outcomes and regressors is generally unknown a priori, a semiparametric negative binomial count data model is proposed which is based on the local likelihood approach and generalized product kernels....

This paper presents a regression procedure for inhomogeneous data characterized by varying variance, skewness and kurtosis or by an unequal amount of data over the estimation domain. The concept is based first on the estimation of the densities of an observed variable for given values of...

This paper estimates the effect of informal care provision on female caregiver's health. We use data from the German Socio-economic Panel and assess effects up to seven years after care provision. A simulation-based sensitivity analysis scrutinizes the sensitivity of the results with respect to...

Previous evidence shows that better insurance coverage increases medical expenditure. However, formal studies on the effect of spending on health outcomes, and especially mental health, are lacking. To fill this gap, we reanalyze data from the Rand Health Insurance Experiment and estimate a...

Employer-provided health insurance may restrict job mobility, resulting in "job lock." Previous research on job lock finds mixed results using several methodologies. We take a new approach to examine job-lock by exploiting the discontinuity created at age 65 through the qualification for...

This paper analyzes optimal risk adjustment for direct risk selection (DRS). Integrating insurers activities for risk selection into a discrete choice model of individuals' health insurance choice shows that DRS has the structure of a contest. For the contest success function used in most of the...

Many developing countries have recently increased health insurance coverage at a large scale. While it is commonly believed that this has positive effects, to date, it is not well understood through which channels health insurance coverage contributes to the well-being of individuals. More...