Insurance plan design has important implications for consumer welfare. In this paper, we model insurance design in the Medicare prescription drug coverage market and show that strategic private insurer incentives impose a fiscal externality on the traditional Medicare program. We document that...

Standardization of complex products is touted as improving consumer decisions and intensifying price competition, but evidence on standardization is limited. We examine a natural experiment: the standardization of health insurance plans on the Massachusetts Health Insurance Exchange....

Competition in health insurance markets may fail to improve health outcomes if consumers are not willing to pay for high quality plans. We document large differences in the mortality rates of Medicare Advantage (MA) plans within local markets. We then show that when high (low) mortality plans...

We present and empirically implement an equilibrium labor market search model where risk averse workers facing medical expenditure shocks are matched with firms making health insurance coverage decisions. Our model delivers a rich set of predictions that can account for a wide variety of...

In the health insurance marketplaces established by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), each state is divided into a set number of geographic ``rating areas." The ACA mandates that an insurer price its health insurance plan uniformly in all counties within the same rating area, conditional on...

We study theoretically and empirically how consumers in an individual private long-term health insurance market with front-loaded contracts respond to newly mandated portability requirements of their old-age provisions. To foster competition, effective 2009, German legislature made the...

We study a general screening model that encompasses a health insurance market in which consumers have multiple dimensions of private information and a price-setting insurer (e.g., a monopolist or a social planner) offers vertically differentiated contracts. We combine theory and empirics to...

We examine cost-plus lagged-price reimbursement contracts, focusing on Medicare Part B's payment for physician-administered drugs. Our theoretical model shows that lagged-price reimbursement can raise launch prices but lower prices in later periods. While previous research showed Part B...

Medicare overbilling refers to the phenomenon that providers report more and/or higher-intensity service codes than actually delivered to receive higher Medicare reimbursement. We propose a novel and easy-to-implement approach to detect potential overbilling based on the hours worked implied by...

Governments contract with private firms to provide a wide range of services. While a large body of previous work has estimated the effects of that contracting, surprisingly little has investigated how those effects vary with the generosity of the contract. In this paper we examine this issue in...