Publicly subsidized private health insurance markets in the United States were created under the assumption that competition would maximize consumer welfare. However, consumers in these markets are willing to pay thousands of dollars to stay in the same health plan, even after accounting for...

We estimate an income process that is consistent with key facts on individual income risk and its variation over the business cycle. In particular, the estimated process generates income fluctuations that display (i) flat and acyclical variance, (ii) volatile and procyclical skewness, (iii) very...

The development of its people is one of the principal objectives of an economy. To the ambit that greater capabilities and opportunities will improve the productivity of people, human development is also expected to have a positive influence on economic growth. The primary objective of this...

Market power can reduce the symptoms of adverse selection. To see the relationship, consider the incentive for a firm to offer a product that appeals to low-risk consumers and leads high-risk consumers to purchase insurance elsewhere. This incentive problem can be addressed through regulation...

We use Monte Carlo experiments to evaluate whether "upward pricing pressure" (UPP) accurately predicts the price effects of mergers, motivated by the observation that UPP is a restricted form of the first order approximation derived in Jaffe and Weyl (2013). Results indicate that UPP is quite...