Obtaining health insurance through an employer pools risk, but may lead to moral hazard, where employees with more coverage seek care valued below cost, and adverse selection, where the unhealthy choose more generous plans, driving up premiums. In the first essay, I model the decision to choose...

Medicare has recently experienced the largest expansion of benefits since its in- ception: the inclusion of prescription drug coverage under the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003. The policy debate has mainly focused on estimating the cost of implementing the...

This dissertation includes two essays on adverse selection and moral hazard problems in reinsurance markets. The first essay builds a competitive principal-agent model that considers adverse selection and moral hazard jointly, and characterizes graphically various forms of separating Nash...

Theoretical research argues that convertible bonds mitigate the contracting costs of moral hazard, adverseselection, and financial distress. Using firm-specific and macroeconomic factors of the contracting costs,we examine the extent to which they impact the likelihood of issuance and the...

We analyze whether fluctuation in economy-wide factors cause time-series variation in thecontracting costs of moral hazard, adverse selection, and financial distress, and so create windows ofopportunity for firms to issue debt. Using the announcement period abnormal returns as one measure of...

Previous tests of creditor moral hazard cannot distinguish between two types of investor behavior: expectations of implicit guarantees or better future economic fundamentals due to a prospective IMF program. The novelty of our approach lies in the inclusion of the forward foreign exchange rate...