Incentivicing doctors to take the costs of treatment into account in their prescription decision could lead to lower health care expenditures and higher welfare. This paper shows that also the opposite effects can result. The reason is a misalignment of doctor and patient incentives: Because of...

Most public elementary and high school teachers are covered by health insurance provided by their employer while they are employed. In most cases, these health plans are managed at the state level. At retirement, teachers with sufficient years of service are allowed to remain in the health plan....

The U.S. workforce is substantially older and better-educated than it was at the end of the 1970s. The typical worker in 2010 was seven years older than in 1979. In 2010, over one-third of US workers had a four-year college degree or more, up from just one-fifth in 1979. Given that older and...

We investigate whether individuals exhibit forward looking behavior in their response to the non-linear pricing common in health insurance contracts. Our primary empirical strategy exploits the fact that employees who join an employer-provided health insurance plan later in the calendar year...

In the early 1990s, several US states enacted community rating regulations to equalize the private health insurance premiums paid by the healthy and the sick. Consistent with severe adverse selection pressures, their private coverage rates fell by 8-11 percentage points more than rates in...

Consumer Directed Health Plans (CDHPs) are new and increasingly popular insurance products in the United States that aim to increase consumer involvement in health care decision-making. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, we examine characteristics of employees in a large firm that...

We develop a test for adverse selection and use it to examine private health insurance markets. In contrast to earlier papers that consider a purely private system or a system in which private insurance supplements a public system, we focus our attention on a system where privately funded health...

Nigeria like most other African countries has responded to the growing challenge of poverty by introducing social protection strategies. Despite the rising popularity of social protection as an anti-poverty intervention throughout Africa, social protection is still inadequate in Nigeria. This...

Township hospitals, which are an important link of the Chinese rural healthcare system, were affected by the successive socio-economic reforms since the 1980s. As a consequence, their utilization declined. From longitudinal data covering nine years (2000-2008) and 24 township hospitals randomly...

This paper investigates the impact of the macroeconomy on the health insurance coverage of Americans using panel data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) for 2004-2010, a period that includes the Great Recession of 2007-09. We find that a one percentage point increase in...