The regulated insurance exchanges set up in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) were designed to deliver affordable, efficient health coverage through private insurers. It is crucial to study the complex industrial organization (IO) of these exchanges in order to assess their impacts during the first...

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...

Market provision of impure public goods such as insurance retirement savings and education is common and growing as policy makers seek to offer more choice and gain efficiencies. This approach induces an important trade-off between improved surplus from matching individuals to products and...

A large literature has analyzed pricing inefficiencies in health insurance markets due to adverse selection, typically assuming informed, active consumers on the demand side of the market. However, recent evidence suggests that many consumers have information frictions that lead to suboptimal...

Measuring consumer responsiveness to medical care prices is a central issue in health economics and a key ingredient in the optimal design and regulation of health insurance markets. We study consumer responsiveness to medical care prices, leveraging a natural experiment that occurred at a large...

Traditional models of insurance choice are predicated on fully informed and rational consumers protecting themselves from exposure to financial risk. In practice, choosing an insurance plan from a set of complex non-linear contracts is a complicated decision often made without full information...

Prior studies suggest that, with elastically supplied inputs, free entry may lead to an inefficiently high number of firms in equilibrium. Under input scarcity, however, the welfare loss from free entry is reduced. Further, free entry may increase use of high-quality inputs, as oligopolistic...