This study evaluates the impact of tort reform on private health insurance coverage using the Current Population Survey’s March Demographic Files. Proponents of tort reform argue that reform will reduce medical malpractice insurance costs, damage awards, and costs associated with defensive...

The healthcare system is sick. The players are incentivized to maximize their own benefit and externalize their costs onto the other parties. This paper examines the warped incentives that underlie the system. The Tort system, lacking expertise and slow to adapt, is unable to overcome lack of...

In this paper I propose implementing a “private regulation regime” for healthcare which would realign health care providers’ incentives so as to significantly reduce the healthcare system’s three major cost drivers: medical errors, defensive medicine and offensive medicine. The private...

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,...

For many years the conventional wisdom on whether legal rules should be used to redistribute resources in society, or whether instead redistribution should be done exclusively through to the tax-and-transfer system, was considered an empirical question best resolved on a case-by-case basis. More...

When insurance works properly it provides insureds with optimal incentives to prevent losses, alongside coverage for losses that could not be prevented efficiently. But insurance has an overlooked dark side to it as well. Insurers employ various tactics to shift losses to their insureds or to...