Most individuals who have health insurance in the U.S. obtain it through their employer. In some states the government mandates employers to provide insurance to certain types of workers. We use experimental laboratory to study how employer mandates affect labor market efficiency and the level...

Objectives- Public health officials have recommended universal condom use to prevent HIV infection, yet condom use varies widely across different demographic groups. We compute the benefits of condom use for individuals with different characteristics and investigate whether condom use rates are...

Objectives- To develop a full taxonomy of potential benefits of HIV testing of hospital patients. To determine whether voluntary, routine testing of hospital patients for HIV is warranted under a cost-benefit criterion. To inform healthcare workers, hospital patients, and decision makers...

The optimal public insurance-taxation scheme is derived for a model with unobservable outcomes. If the government can only observe aggregate commodity expenditures, reimbursement insurance is constrained-efficient. However, two distortions accompany. First, consumers are induced to take (forego)...

This paper presents Tobit estimates of the demand for physician visits. Using the 1980 National Health Interview Survey and price data from the Tobacco Institute, estimates of the effect of cigarette prices on physician utilization are obtained. Statistically significant coefficients imply a...

This paper views cigarette taxation as a correction for health insurance distortions (an efficiency tax). The theoretical framework utilizes an individual expected utility maximizing consumer-optimal social planner model. From the model an optimal tax formula is derived. There are two main...

"This is an experimental study in economics of mandated benefits. Most individuals who have health insurance in the United States obtain it through their employer. Some states require employers to provide insurance to certain types of workers. We used an experimental laboratory to investigate...

The objectives of this paper are threefold: first, to develop a taxonomy of potential benefits from voluntary, routine HIV-antibody testing of hospital patients; second, to inform attending healthcare workers, hospital patients and policy makers of the potential benefits from such testing; and...

This study investigates the impact of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) expansion in Hawaii on health insurance coverage among low-income children ages 0 to 18 using the Current Population Survey. We employ a difference-in-differences approach by construction of a control...