Large, unpredictable and not fully insurable health-care costs represent a source of background risk that might deter households' financial risk taking. Using panel data from the Health and Retirement Study and fixed-effects estimation, we test whether universal health insurance, like Medicare...

A main goal of health insurance is to smooth out the financial risk that comes with health shocks and health care. Nevertheless, there has been relatively sparse evidence on how health insurance affects financial outcomes. The few studies that exist focus on the effect of gaining health...

We estimate the effect of the Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion on county-level mortality in the first four years following expansion. We find a reduction in all-cause mortality in ages 20 to 64 equaling 11.36 deaths per 100,000 individuals, a 3.6 percent decrease. This estimate is largely...

A majority of married couples in the United States take advantage of the fact that employers often provide health insurance coverage to spouses. When the older spouses become eligible for Medicare, however, many of them can no longer provide their younger spouses with coverage. In this paper, we...

While a large literature examines the immediate and long-run effects of public health insurance, much less is known about the impacts of total program exposure on child developmental outcomes. This paper uses an instrumental variable strategy to estimate the effect of cumulative eligibility gain...

Objective: To study how changes in insurance benefit design affect medication use of older adults with mental disorders.Data sources: US Medicare claims data from 2007 to 2018.Study Design: We focus on the gradual elimination of the Medicare prescription drug coverage gap beginning in 2011, and...

We provide new insights regarding the finding that Medicaid increased emergency department (ED) use from the Oregon experiment. We find meaningful heterogeneous impacts of Medicaid on ED use using causal machine learning methods. The treatment effect distribution is widely dispersed, and the...

We provide new insights regarding the finding that Medicaid increased emergency department (ED) use from the Oregon experiment. We find meaningful heterogeneous impacts of Medicaid on ED use using causal machine learning methods. The treatment effect distribution is widely dispersed, and the...

A majority of married couples in the United States take advantage of the fact that employers often provide health insurance coverage to spouses. When the older spouses become eligible for Medicare, however, many of them can no longer provide their younger spouses with coverage. In this paper, we...

I study the effect of the 1973 expansion of Medicare coverage to individuals with End-Stage Renal Disease (ESRD) on insurance coverage, health care utilization, and mortality. Between the ESRD expansion and a simultaneous expansion of Medicare coverage to long-term Social Security Disability...