Most existing work on the demand for health insurance focuses on employees’ decisions to enroll in employer-provided plans. Yet any attempt to achieve universal coverage must focus on the uninsured, the vast majority of whom are not offered employer-sponsored insurance. In the summer of 2008,...

Despite the widespread provision of retiree health insurance for public sector workers, little attention has been paid to its effects on employee retirement. This is in contrast to the large literature on health-insurance-induced “job-lock” in the private sector. I use the introduction of...

In two important health policy contexts – private plans in Medicare and the new state-run “Exchanges” created as part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – plan payments come from two sources: risk-adjusted payments from a Regulator and premiums charged to individual enrollees. This paper...

New regulation of health insurance markets creates multiple levels of health plans, with designations like “Gold” and “Silver.” The underlying rationale for the heavy-metal approach to insurance regulation is that heterogeneity in demand for health care is not only due to health status...

It is well-known that pooled insurance coverage can induce people to make inefficiently low investments in self-protective activities. We identify another ex ante moral hazard that runs in the opposite direction. Lower levels of self-protection and the associated chronic conditions and...

Prior to the Affordable Care Act, the majority of states in the U.S. had already implemented state laws that extended the age that young adults could enroll as dependents on their parent's employer-based health insurance plans. Because of the fundamental link between health insurance and...

Using the 2006 China Agricultural Census (CAC), we examine whether the introduction of the New Cooperative Medical System (NCMS) has affected child mortality, maternal mortality, and school enrollment of 6–16year olds. Our data cover 5.9 million people living in eight low-income rural...

The first major insurance expansion of the Affordable Care Act – a provision requiring insurers to allow dependents to remain on parents’ health insurance until turning 26 – took effect in September 2010. We estimate this mandate's impacts on numerous outcomes related to health care...