We study the Medicare Part D prescription drug insurance program as a bellwether for designs of private, non-mandatory health insurance markets, focusing on the ability of consumers to evaluate and optimize their choices of plans. Our analysis of administrative data on medical claims in Medicare...

The effectiveness of population-level cancer screening is a salient issue in health policy that remains unresolved. This paper investigates changes in mortality after the introduction of screening guidelines for breast and prostate cancers in the United States and United Kingdom. We use...

This paper compares mortality between Gold and Silver medalists in Olympic Track and Field to study how achievement influences health. Contrary to conventional wisdom, winners die over one year earlier than losers. Data on pre-Olympic performances and each athlete’s career length suggest that...

We examine whether the least educated population groups experienced the worst mortality trends during the 21st century by measuring changes in mortality across education quartiles. We document sharply differing gender patterns. Among women, mortality trends improved fairly monotonically with...

Not everyone makes wise financial choices. A large body of research documents behavior inconsistent with well-informed consumers maximizing their expected utility of consumption. It remains unknown, however, whether such behavior is correlated across domains. This paper uses two novel datasets...

Existing research on selection in insurance markets focuses on how adverse selection distorts prices and misallocates products across people. This ignores the distributional consequences of who pays the higher prices. In this paper, we show that the distributional incidence depends on the...

This paper analyzes how Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) can be used in conjunction with other savings vehicles to improve retirement preparedness. We build a life-cycle model that incorporates an HSA, a tax-advantaged defined contribution (DC) account, and a liquid taxable account. Individuals...

Workplace benefits now comprise roughly one-third of total employee compensation. At the same time, the choice of benefits has grown increasingly complex. Using a novel survey at 15 universities linked with administrative data on retirement accounts, we examine employee decision-making related...