Most non-elderly Americans purchase insurance through their employers, which sponsor a limited number of plans. We estimate how much employees would be willing to pay for the right to apply their employer subsidy to the plan of their choosing. We make use of a proprietary dataset containing...

Branded pharmaceutical manufacturers frequently offer "copay coupons'" that insulate consumers from cost-sharing, thereby undermining insurers' ability to influence drug utilization. We study the impact of copay coupons on branded drugs first facing generic entry between 2007 and 2010. To...

This paper examines the strategic behavior of hospitals in one of their primary output markets: inpatient surgical procedures. High levels of learning-by-doing in surgical fields may act as a barrier to entry. I investigate whether incumbent hospitals facing prospective entry in a procedure...

This paper investigates whether hospitals respond in profit-maximizing ways to changes in diagnosis-specific prices determined by Medicare's Prospective Payment System and other public and private insurers. Previous studies have been unable to isolate this response because changes in...

The majority of private health insurance in the U.S. is administered or issued by for-profit insurers, but little is known about how for-profit status affects outcomes. We find that plausibly exogenous increases in local for-profit market share induced by conversions of Blue Cross and Blue...

We examine whether and to what extent consolidation in the U.S. health insurance industry is leading to higher employer-sponsored insurance premiums. We make use of a proprietary, panel dataset of employer-sponsored healthplans enrolling over 10 million Americans annually between 1998 and 2006...

We evaluate the effect of tort reform on employer-sponsored health insurance premiums by exploiting state-level variation in the timing of reforms. Using a dataset of healthplans representing over 10 million Americans annually between 1998 and 2006, we find that caps on non-economic damages,...

First-year insurer participation in the Health Insurance Marketplaces (HIMs) established by the Affordable Care Act is limited in many areas of the country. There are 3.9 participants, on (population-weighted) average, in the 395 ratings areas spanning the 34 states with federally facilitated...

One of the benefits commonly claimed for expanded public health insurance is improved efficiency of medical care delivery, but this claim has little rigorous empirical support. We provide such support by assessing the impact of the Medicaid expansions over the 1983-1996 period on the incidence...

We consider the effect of mergers between firms whose products are not viewed as direct substitutes for the same good or service, but are bundled by a common intermediary. Focusing on hospital mergers across distinct geographic markets, we show that such combinations can reduce competition among...