Theoretical considerations suggest that nonlinear health care price schedules have heterogeneous effects on health care demand. In this paper, we develop and apply a finite mixture bivariate probit model to analyze whether there are heterogeneous reactions to the introduction of a nonlinear...

Abstract ; Background: The health care reform of 2004 was intended to reduce moral hazard in the statutory health insurance through various financial incentives. An important element of the reform has been the introduction of a per-quarter fee for doctor visits. The second part of the reform has...

The German health care reform of 2004 imposes a charge of 10 Euro for the first visit to a doctor in each quarter of the year. At first glance, there is no inhibiting effect of this fee on utilization in the German Socio-Economic Panel. However, this study reveals that the true effect is...

Hurdle models based on the zero-truncated Poisson-lognormal distribution are rarely used in applied work, although they incorporate some advantages compared with their negative binomial alternatives. I present a command that enables Stata users to estimate Poisson-lognormal hurdle models. I use...

When health insurance reforms involve non-linear price schedules tied to payment periods (for example, a quarter or a year), the empirical analysis of its effects has to take the within-period time structure of incentives into account. The analysis is further complicated when demand data are...

Testing for asymmetric information in insurance markets has become a very important issue in the empirical literature in the last years. We analyze the (private) accident insurance, which has not been analyzed before in the literature, but covers one of the most important risks faced by...

type="main" xml:lang="en" <title type="main">Abstract</title> <p>Asymmetric information is an important phenomenon in insurance markets, but the empirical evidence on the extent of adverse selection and moral hazard is mixed. Because of its implications for pricing, contract design, and regulation, it is crucial to test for...</p>