We study theoretically and empirically how consumers in an individual private long-term health insurance market with front-loaded contracts respond to newly mandated portability requirements of their old-age provisions. To foster competition, effective 2009, German legislature made the...

We study biased survival expectations across two domains and examine whether such biased expectations influence health and financial behaviors. Combining individual-level longitudinal data, retrospective, and end of life data from several European countries for more than a decade, we estimate...

We study the effect of further public caregiving subsidies (and insurance expansions to cover long-term care) on savings and saving behaviour. Specifically, weexamine the unique progressive introduction of a universal public long-term care subsidy (Sistema para la Autonomía y Atención a la...

India launched the ‘Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana' (RSBY) health insurance scheme for the poor in 2008. Utilising 3 waves (1999-2000, 2004-05 and 2011-12) of household level data from the nationally representative consumption expenditure survey of the National Sample Survey Organisation and...

The high cost of capital for firms conducting medical research and development (R&D) has been partly attributed to the government risk facing investors in medical innovation. This risk slows down medical innovation because investors must be compensated for it. We propose new and simple financial...

There are some microinsurance schemes in Western Asia but not many. The question is why? The existence of microinsurance in Western Asia shows that it is principally feasible in this part of the world. And the large range of different products offered by the existing scheme shows that the...

I take advantage of regulatory and pricing dynamics in Medicare Part D to empirically explore interactions among adverse selection, switching costs, and regulation. I first document novel evidence of adverse selection and switching costs within Part D using detailed administrative data. I then...

Long-term care (LTC) is the largest insurable risk that old-age individuals face in most western societies. However, the demand for LTC insurance is still ostensibly small in comparison to the financial risk, which is reflected in the formation of expectations of insurance coverage. One...

Conventional wisdom suggests that if private health insurance plans compete alongside a public option, they may endanger the latter's financial stability by cream-skimming good risks. Documenting cream-skimming in dual insurance systems empirically is challenging, since selection into private...

In a pervasive but controversial practice, drug firms frequently make monetary or in-kind payments to medical providers. Critics are concerned that drug firms are distorting prescribing behavior away from the best interests of patients, while defenders of the practice claim that payments arise...