Designing benefits for the growing platform workforce in the U.S. poses significant challenges. While platform workers need protection against unforeseen shocks, work that is often part time and spread across multiple platforms makes the traditional benefits model untenable. This paper reports...

Government backed income contingent student loans are an increasingly being used to fund higher education. An income contingent repayment plan acts as an incremental marginal tax on labor earnings, which could cause individuals to distort their work effort. This paper uses an administrative...

We examine how consumers respond to being effectively double insured under two systems: group health (GH) and workers' compensation (WC). Many GH plans have substantial consumer cost-sharing burden, while WC coverage has no cost-sharing for medical services for work-related injuries. As a...

As we approach the tenth anniversary of the passage of the Affordable Care Act, it is important to reflect on what has been learned about the impacts of this major reform. In this paper we review the literature on the impacts of the ACA on patients, providers and the economy. We find strong...

Stemming from the belief that the key barrier to achieving high-quality and low-cost health care is the deficiency of information and medical knowledge among patients, an enormous number of health policies are focused on patient education. In this paper, we attempt to place an upper bound on the...

There are ongoing debates around the world over the value of private supplements to public health insurance systems. We investigate this issue in the context of one of the world's deadliest diseases, diabetes, and one of the countries with the worst diabetes problems in the world, Mexico. We...

We empirically assess the potential financial impact of future gene therapies on the US economy. After identifying 109 late-stage gene therapy clinical trials currently underway, we estimate the number of new and existing patients with corresponding diseases to be treated by these gene...

We model automatic trigger policies for unemployment insurance by simulating a weekly panel of individual labor market histories, grouped by state. We reach three conclusions: (i) policies designed to trigger immediately at the onset of a recession result in benefit extensions that occur in less...

COVID-19 has created a dual set of stresses on health care systems worldwide: a rise in expensive intensive care services and a dramatic decline in elective services. The U.S. government has responded with both grant and loan programs to help health care providers weather the storm. But the...

Managing the outbreak of COVID-19 in India constitutes an unprecedented health emergency in one of the largest and most diverse nations in the world. On May 4, 2020, India started the process of releasing its population from a national lockdown during which extreme social distancing was...