In many markets insurers are barred from price discrimination based on con- sumer characteristics like age, gender, and medical history. In this paper, I build on a recent literature to show why such policies are inefficient if consumers differ in their willingness-to-pay for insurance...

Existing research on selection in insurance markets focuses on how adverse selection distorts prices and misallocates products across people. This ignores the distributional consequences of who pays the higher prices. In this paper, we show that the distributional incidence depends on the...

Health insurance is increasingly provided through managed competition, in which subsidies for consumers and risk adjustment for insurers are key market design instruments. We illustrate that subsidies offer two advantages over risk adjustment in markets with adverse selection. They provide...

Half of U.S. 50-year-olds will experience a nursing home stay before they die, and one in ten will incur out-of-pocket long-term care expenses in excess of $200,000. Surprisingly, only about 10% of individuals over age 62 have private long-term care insurance (LTCI). This paper proposes a...

We analyze the extent to which three important factors can explain the high costs of health care in the US relative to the UK: (i) the high cost of medical education, (ii) high risks/costs associated with malpractice litigation, and (iii) excessive diagnostic testing arising from the practice of...

We study how increasing contract length affects adverse selection in health insurance markets. Although health risks are persistent, private health insurance contracts in the United States have short, one-year terms. Short-term, community-rated contracts allow patients to increase their coverage...

Health plans for the poor increasingly limit access to specialty hospitals. We investigate the role of adverse selection in generating this equilibrium among private plans in Medicaid. Studying a network change, we find that covering a top cancer hospital causes severe adverse selection,...

We study how the politicization of policies designed to correct market failures can undermine their effectiveness. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) was among the most politically divisive expansions of the US government. We examine whether partisanship distorted enrollment...

In the past three decades, farm families have relied on government payments and off-farm income to reduce income risk and increase total household income. Many studies have analyzed the role of government payments; however, little is known about the impact of health insurance coverage on labor...

Employer-provided health insurance in the United States is suspected of restricting job mobility, resulting in "job lock." Previous research on job lock finds mixed results using several methodologies. We take a new approach to examine whether employer-based health insurance discourages job...