The trend towards giving consumers choice about their health plans has invited research on how good they actually are at making these decisions. The introduction of Medicare Part D is an important example. Initial plan choices in this market were generally far from optimal. In this paper, we...

Under the U.S. Affordable Care Act (ACA), many low income consumers will become eligible for government support to buy health insurance. Whether these consumers are able to take advantage of the support and to make sound decisions about purchasing health insurance will likely depend on their...

We investigate two determinants of the price sensitivity of health plan demand: the size of the choice set and the salience of premium differences. Using variation in both features in the German Social Health Insurance (SHI) and information on health plan switches of retirees in the German Socio...

Consumers' health plan choices are highly persistent even though optimal plans change over time. This paper separates two sources of inertia, inattention to plan choice and switching costs. We develop a panel data model with separate attention and choice stages, linked by heterogeneity in...

Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), many low-income consumers have become eligible for government support to buy health insurance. Whether these consumers are able to take advantage of the support and to make sound decisions about purchasing health insurance likely...

We investigate two determinants of the price sensitivity of health plan demand: the size of the choice set and the salience of premium differences. We use variation in the choice set over time and between regions in the German Social Health Insurance (SHI), and an increase in the salience of...

The trend towards giving consumers choice about their health plans has invited research on how good they actually are at making these decisions. The introduction of Medicare Part D is an important example. Initial plan choices in this market were generally far from optimal. In this paper, we...

This documentation describes the data preparation of the new consumption module in the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) and introduces the content and structure of the generated dataset "hconsum". In 2010, the SOEP for the first time included a detailed consumption module in the...