What are the welfare effects of a policy that facilitates for insurance customers to privately and covertly learn about their accident risks? We endogenize the information structure in Stiglitz's classic monopoly insurance model. We first show that his results are robust: For a small information...

We study the political determination of the level of social long-term care insurance when voters also choose private insurance and saving amounts. Agents differ in income, probability of becoming dependent and of receiving family help. Social insurance redistributes across income and risk...

In a model where patients face budget constraints that make some treatments unaffordable, we ask which treatments should be covered by universal basic insurance and which by private voluntary insurance. We argue that both cost effectiveness and prevalence are important if the government wants to...

This paper introduces a tractable model of health insurance with both moral hazard and adverse selection. We show that government sponsored universal basic insurance should cover treatments with the biggest adverse selection problems. Treatments not covered by basic insurance can be covered on...

Consumers, when buying health insurance, do not know the exact value of each treatment that they buy coverage for. This leads them to overvalue some treatments and undervalue others. We show that the insurance market cannot correct these mistakes. This causes research labs to overinvest in...

We study a monopoly insurance model with endogenous information acquisition. Through a continuous effort choice, consumers can determine the precision of a privately observed signal that is informative about their accident risk. The equilibrium effort is, depending on parameter values, either...

This Paper analyses the effect of terror on the economy. Terror endangers life such that the value of the future relative to the present is reduced. Hence, due to a rise in terror activity, investment goes down, and in the long run income and consumption go down as well. Governments can offset...

Conventional wisdom in economic history suggests that conflict between countries can be enormously disruptive of economic activity, especially international trade. Yet nothing is known empirically about these effects in large samples. We study the effects of war on bilateral trade for almost all...

What are the main causes of international terrorism? The lessons from the surge of academic research that followed 9/11 remain elusive. The careful investigation of the relative roles of economic and political conditions did little to change the fact that existing econometric estimates diverge...

This paper studies the dynamics of violence in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict since the outbreak of the Second (or 'Al-Aqsa') Intifada in September 2000, during which more than 3,300 Palestinians and more than 1,000 Israelis have been killed. The conflict has followed an uneven pattern, with...