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....

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...

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...

This paper is motivated by our attempt to answer an empirical question: how is private health insurance take-up in Australia affected by the income threshold at which the Medicare Levy Surcharge (MLS) kicks in? We propose a new difference de-convolution kernel estimator for the location and size...

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...

We use a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) to evaluate the impact of cost-sharing on the use of health services. In the Italian health system, individuals reaching age 65 and earning low incomes are given total exemption from cost-sharing for health services consumption. Since the...

How much are low-income individuals willing to pay for health insurance, and what are the implications for insurance markets? Using administrative data from Massachusetts' subsidized insurance exchange, we exploit discontinuities in the subsidy schedule to estimate willingness to pay and costs...