This paper provides a theoretical and empirical investigation of the positive complementarities between disease-specific policies introduced by competing risks of mortality. The incentive to invest in prevention against one cause of death depends positively on the level of survival from other...

HIV-prevention strategies have yielded only limited success so far in slowing down the AIDS epidemic. This paper examines novel intervention strategies that use incentives to discourage risky sexual behaviors. Widely-adopted conditional cash transfer programs that offer payments conditioning on...

A key issue surrounding employer benefit mandates is the incidence on workers through wages and employment. In this paper, we address this question using a pay-or-play policy implemented in San Francisco in 2008 that requires employers to either provide health benefits or contribute to a public...

In 2006 San Francisco adopted major health reform, becoming the first city to implement a pay-or-play employer health spending mandate. It also created Healthy San Francisco, a "public option" to promote affordable universal access to care. Using the 2008 Bay Area Employer Health Benefits...

One goal of government health insurance programs is to improve health, yet little is known empirically about how important such government interventions can be in explaining health transitions. We analyze the child mortality effects of a major health insurance expansion in Costa Rica. In...

Patent protection spurs innovation by raising the rewards for research, but it usually results in less desirable allocations after the innovation has been discovered. In effect, patents reward inventors with inefficient monopoly power. However, previous analysis of intellectual property has...

The classic theory of moral hazard concerns the insurance of a single good and predicts that co-insurance is larger when the elasticity of demand is higher and when small risks are insured. We extend this analysis to the insurance of multiple goods; for example, the simultaneous insurance of...

Medical care at the end of life, which is often is estimated to contribute up to a quarter of US health care spending, often encounters skepticism from payers and policy makers who question its high cost and often minimal health benefits. It seems generally agreed upon that medical resources are...

Many forms of insurance are produced by groups themselves rather than purchased in the market. For example, coverage for workers compensation provided by employers is often produced by the employer, in the sense that the employer bears some or all of the financial risk associated with the...

This paper tests restrictions implied by the canonical theory of insurance under asymmetric information using ideal data that contains the self-perceived and actual mortality risk of individuals, as well as the price and quantity of their life insurance. We report several findings which are hard...