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...

We study how extreme weather exposure impacts infant survival in the developing world. Our analysis overcomes the absence of vital registration systems in many poor countries by extracting birth histories from household surveys. Studying 53 developing countries that span five continents, we find...

Definitions can matter, and Don Fullerton and Michael Geruso argue that proponents of social security privatization mean a host of different things by "privatization." They point out that many of the gains from privatization seen by economists like Martin Feldstein and Laurence Kotlikoff owe to...

Many employers have implemented dependent verification (DV) programs, which aim to reduce employee benefits costs by ensuring that ineligible persons are not enrolled in their health plan as dependents. We evaluate a DV program using a panel of health plan enrollment data from a large,...

We examine the impact of educational attainment on fertility and mating market outcomes. Using a regression discontinuity design, we exploit an extension of the compulsory schooling age from 15 to 16 in 1972 in the UK. The change was binding for a quarter of the population. Simple plots of the...

Medicare pricing is known to indirectly influence provider prices and care provision for non-Medicare patients; however, Medicare's regulatory externalities are less well-understood. We study such implications by examining how physicians' outpatient surgery setting preferences respond to the...

In most US health insurance markets, plans face strong incentives to "upcode" the patient diagnoses they report to the regulator, as these affect the risk-adjusted payments plans receive. We show that enrollees in private Medicare plans generate 6% to 16% higher diagnosis-based risk scores than...

A central question in the debate over privatized Medicare is whether increased government payments to private Medicare Advantage (MA) plans generate lower premiums for consumers or higher profits for producers. Using difference-in-differences variation brought about by a sharp legislative...

Exploiting random assignment of Medicaid beneficiaries to managed care plans, we identify plan-specific effects on healthcare utilization. Auto-assignment to the lowest-spending plan generates 30% lower spending than if the same enrollee were assigned to the highest-spending plan, despite...