To insure policyholders against contemporaneous health expenditure shocks and future reclassification risk, long-term health insurance constitutes an alternative to community-rated short-term contracts with an individual mandate. Relying on unique claims panel data from a large private insurer...

This paper provides a simple explanation for why some minority groups are economically successful, despite being subject to government-mandated discriminatory policies. We study an economy with private and public sectors in which workers invest in imperfectly observable skills that are important...

We study theoretically and empirically how consumers in an individual private longterm health insurance market with front-loaded contracts respond to newly mandated portability requirements of their old-age provisions. To foster competition, effective 2009, the German legislature made the...

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is far-reaching. In this paper, we selectively review the rapidly growing literature with a focus on (1) the impact of COVID-19 on the labor market, both in terms of overall employment and in terms of work-from-home arrangements; (2) how COVID-19 may impact...

To insure policyholders against contemporaneous health expenditure shocks and future reclassification risk, long-term health insurance constitutes an alternative to community-rated short-term contracts with an individual mandate. In this paper, we study the German long-term health insurance...

We de.ne and analyze a strategic topology on types in the Harsanyi-Mertens-Zamir universal type space, where two types are close if their strategic behavior is similar in all strategic situations. For a .xed game and action de.ne the distance be-tween a pair of types as the diþerence between...

What are the welfare effects of enhanced disclosures of public information - Is it always the case, that frequent and timely publication of economic statistics by government agencies and the central bank are desirable - This question has become one of several interlinked strands of debate on the...

We investigate the relationship between obesity and life expectancy, and whether or not this relationship varies by socioeconomic status (SES). The underlying model is based on the "Pathways to health" framework in which SES affects health by modifying the relationship between lifestyles and...