This paper tests the hypothesis that the salience of a tax system affects equilibrium tax rates. To do this, I analyze how toll rates change after toll facilities adopt electronic toll collection. Unlike manual toll collection, in which the driver must hand over cash at the toll collection...

This paper investigates the effects of market-wide changes in health insurance by examining the single largest change in health insurance coverage in American history: the introduction of Medicare in 1965. I estimate that the impact of Medicare on hospital spending is substantially larger than...

Rapid technological progress has been a defining feature of the medical sector over the last century, yet we know little about the determinants of the development of these new technologies. This paper examines whether and to what extent the demand-side incentives embodied in health policy affect...

Wilson (1977) provided the striking result that the government can always Pareto dominate a pooling equilibrium in a private insurance market with adverse selection by providing the pooling policy as a compulsory public policy and allowing individuals to buy supplementary private insurance. I...

A ubiquitous form of government intervention in insurance markets is to provide compulsory, but partial, public insurance coverage and to allow voluntary purchases of supplementary insurance on the private market. Yet we know little about the effects of such programs on total insurance coverage...

We study the role of physicians in driving geographic variation of US healthcare utilization. We estimate a model that separates variation in average utilization of Medicare beneficiaries due to physicians, non-physician supply side factors, and patient demand. The model is identified by...

This paper presents new evidence on the importance of adverse selection in insurance markets. We use a unique data set, consisting of all annuity policies sold by a large U.K. insurance company since the early 1980s, to analyze mortality differences across groups of individuals who purchased...

This paper presents new evidence on the importance of adverse selection in individual annuity markets. It focuses on the individual annuity market in the United Kingdom, which provides an excellent empirical setting for studying selection effects. In addition to a voluntary annuity market, the...

We estimate the effect of current location on elderly mortality by analyzing outcomes of movers in the Medicare population. We control for movers' origin locations as well as a rich vector of pre-move health measures. We also develop a novel strategy to adjust for remaining unobservables, based...

Debates over whether and when to recommend screening for a potential disease focus on the causal impact of screening for a typical individual covered by the recommendation, who may differ from the typical individual who responds to the recommendation. We explore this distinction in the context...