We examine whether and to what extent consolidation in the US health insurance industry has contributed to higher employer-sponsored insurance premiums. We exploit the differential impact across local markets of a national merger of two insurers to identify the causal effect of concentration on...

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...

One of the goals of the legal liability system is to ensure that sellers provide appropriate care. Reputation effects may also deter negligence. The little available research evidence suggests that reputation effects are minimal, however. We develop a theory tailored to an environment, such as...

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...