In the absence of third party and prepayment systems such as health insurance and tax-based healthcare financing, households in many low-income countries are exposed to the financial risks of paying large medical bills from out-of-pocket. In recent years, community based health insurance schemes...

The international surveys of pupil achievement – PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS – have been widely used to compare socioeconomic gradients in children's cognitive abilities across countries. Socioeconomic status is typically measured drawing on children's reports of family or home characteristics...

In the first two quarters of 2013 the Georgian government introduced and fully implemented a universal health care (UHC) plan covering all those not-yet publicly or privately insured. We estimate the effect of the introduction of the universal healthcare plan on the level of out-of-pocket (OOP)...

A vast literature studies the behavioural impacts of health care reforms, often coming to controversial conclusions. Here we examine the time allocation effects of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obama Care, focusing on two ACA pillars: Medicaid expansion, which increased access to public...

The existing literature provides evidence that public opinion and attitudes often affect public policy. However, little is known on how public policy might affect public attitudes and norms. I present new evidence on this topic by using age-based health insurance policies in the United States as...

The aging of the farmer population has led to concern about a shortage of beginning farmers and ranchers. This study investigates the impact of health insurance coverage and participation in government and private insurance programs on off-farm labor allocation decisions of beginning...

We provide new insights regarding the finding that Medicaid increased emergency department (ED) use from the Oregon experiment. We find meaningful heterogeneous impacts of Medicaid on ED use using causal machine learning methods. The treatment effect distribution is widely dispersed, and the...

We report on a large randomized controlled trial of hospital insurance for above-poverty-line Indian households. Households were assigned to free insurance, sale of insurance, sale plus cash transfer, or control. To estimate spillovers, the fraction of households offered insurance varied across...

Penalty mandates are used in many countries to encourage people to purchase health insurance. But are they effective? We use a large administrative dataset for a 10% random sample of all Australian tax-filers to study how people respond to a step-wise age-based mandate, and whether this has...

States are increasingly resorting to raising the minimum wage to boost the earnings of those at the bottom of the income distribution. In this paper, we examine the effects of minimum wage increases on the health of low-educated Hispanic women, who constitute a growing part of the U.S. labor...