Unhealthy Insurance Markets: Search Frictions and the Cost and Quality of Health Insurance

By Randall D. Cebul, James B. Rebitzer, Lowell J. Taylor, and Mark E. Votruba

American Economic Review, August 2011

We analyze the effect of search frictions in the market for commercial health insurance. Frictions increase insurance premiums (enough to transfer 13.2 percent of consumer surplus from fully insured employer groups to insurers—approximately $34.4 b...

Pricing and Welfare in Health Plan Choice

By M. Kate Bundorf, Jonathan Levin, and Neale Mahoney

American Economic Review, December 2012

Premiums in health insurance markets frequently do not reflect individual differences in costs, either because consumers have private information or because prices are not risk rated. This creates inefficiencies when consumers self-select into plans. We ...

Prediction Policy Problems

By Jon Kleinberg, Jens Ludwig, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Ziad Obermeyer

American Economic Review, May 2015

Most empirical policy work focuses on causal inference. We argue an important class of policy problems does not require causal inference but instead requires predictive inference. Solving these "prediction policy problems" requires more than simple regres...

Economic Status and Health in Childhood: The Origins of the Gradient

By Anne Case, Darren Lubotsky, and Christina Paxson

American Economic Review, December 2002

The well-known positive association between health and income in adulthood has antecedents in childhood. Not only is children's health positively related to household income, but the relationship between household income and children's health becomes more...

Paying Not to Go to the Gym

By Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmendier

American Economic Review, June 2006

How do consumers choose from a menu of contracts? We analyze a novel dataset from three U.S. health clubs with information on both the contractual choice and the day-to-day attendance decisions of 7,752 members over three years. The observed consumer b...

Policy Watch: U.S. Disability Policy in a Changing Environment

By Richard V. Burkhauser and Mary C. Daly

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2002

In this paper we provide a context for evaluating the goals and effectiveness of current disability policy. We review the Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income programs and examine trends in disability benefit receipt and e...

Health and Wealth among the Poor: India and South Africa Compared

By Anne Case and Angus Deaton

American Economic Review, May 2005

Trends in Employment and Earnings of Allowed and Rejected Applicants to the Social Security Disability Insurance Program

By Till von Wachter, Jae Song, and Joyce Manchester

American Economic Review, December 2011

Longitudinal administrative data show that rejected male applicants to the Disability Insurance (DI) program who are younger or have low-mortality impairments such as back pain and mental health problems exhibit substantial labor force attachment. While w...

Winter Is Coming: Robert Gordon and the Future of Economic Growth

By Gregory Clark

American Economic Review, May 2016

This comment assesses the claim of The Rise and Fall of American Growth that for coming decades, growth in US TFP will continue the disappointing pace of the last decade. While predicting future technological advance is difficult, there are indic...

Do Physicians' Financial Incentives Affect Medical Treatment and Patient Health?

By Jeffrey Clemens and Joshua D. Gottlieb

American Economic Review, April 2014

We investigate whether physicians' financial incentives influence health care supply, technology diffusion, and resulting patient outcomes. In 1997, Medicare consolidated the geographic regions across which it adjusts physician payments, generating are...

Missing in Action: Teacher and Health Worker Absence in Developing Countries

[Symposium: Public Sector Absenteeism]

By Nazmul Chaudhury, Jeffrey Hammer, Michael Kremer, Karthik Muralidharan, and F. Halsey Rogers

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2006

In this paper, we report results from surveys in which enumerators made unannounced visits to primary schools and health clinics in Bangladesh, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Peru and Uganda and recorded whether they found teachers and health workers in the f...

The Effect of Health Risk on Housing Values: Evidence from a Cancer Cluster

By Lucas W. Davis

American Economic Review, December 2004

Bundling Health Insurance and Microfinance in India: There Cannot Be Adverse Selection If There Is No Demand

By Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Richard Hornbeck

American Economic Review, May 2014

Microfinance institutions have started to bundle their basic loans with other financial services, such as health insurance. Using a randomized control trial in Karnataka, India, we evaluate the impact on loan renewal from mandating the purchase of actuari...

Micro-loans, Insecticide-Treated Bednets, and Malaria: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial in Orissa, India

By Alessandro Tarozzi, Aprajit Mahajan, Brian Blackburn, Dan Kopf, Lakshmi Krishnan, and Joanne Yoong

American Economic Review, July 2014

We describe findings from the first large-scale cluster randomized controlled trial in a developing country that evaluates the uptake of a health-protecting technology, insecticide-treated bednets (ITNs), through micro-consumer loans, as compared to free ...

Dynamic Implications of Subjective Expectations: Evidence from Adult Smokers

By Yang Wang

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2014

We set up a dynamic discrete choice model with subjective expectations data to explain adult smokers' find important differences between subjective survival probabilities and those estimated using observed mortality data. Subjectively, individuals att...

Measuring Consumer Valuation of Limited Provider Networks

By Keith Marzilli Ericson and Amanda Starc

American Economic Review, May 2015

We measure the breadth of insurance networks in the Massachusetts health insurance exchange. Using our measures, we estimate consumer willingness-to-pay for broad and narrow networks. We find that consumers have a wide range of plans available with dramat...

Taxes, Cigarette Consumption, and Smoking Intensity

By Jérôme Adda and Francesca Cornaglia

American Economic Review, September 2006

This paper analyses the compensatory behavior of smokers. Exploiting data on cotinine concentration—a metabolite of nicotine—measured in a large population of smokers over time, we show that smokers compensate for tax hikes by extracting more nicotin...

Pricing Institutions and the Welfare Cost of Adverse Selection

By E. Glen Weyl and André Veiga

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2017

To mitigate adverse selection in insurance markets, individuals are often mandated to buy at least a baseline plan, but may choose to opt into a premium plan. In some markets, such as US health exchanges, each plan is responsible for the full expenses of ...

Insurer-Provider Networks in the Medical Care Market

By Katherine Ho

American Economic Review, March 2009

I use data on the hospital networks offered by managed care health insurers to estimate the expected division of profits between insurers and providers. I include a simple profit-maximization framework and an additional effect: hospitals that can secur...

One Chance in a Million: Altruism and the Bone Marrow Registry

By Theodore C. Bergstrom, Rodney J. Garratt, and Damien Sheehan-Connor

American Economic Review, September 2009

Stem cell transplants save lives of many patients with blood diseases. Donation is painful, but rarely has lasting adverse effects. Patients can accept transplants only from donors with compatible immune systems. Those lacking a sibling match must seek...