We study how health insurance deductibles affect healthcare spending and health using a regression discontinuity design and administrative data from the Netherlands. Exploiting an annual deductible reset, we compare patients admitted to the emergency room just before and after January 1....

Der vorliegende Report basiert auf der Auswertung von Preisdaten von insgesamt 10.820 vollstationären Pflegeheimen in Deutschland, die auf der Plattform "pflegelotse.de" des Verbands der Ersatzkassen bereitgestellt werden und mit Hilfe von Web Scraping Anfang Oktober 2024 gesammelt wurden. Ziel...

Health care markets often lack a market force because the presence of health insurance undermines price signals. Patients have little incentive to shop for low-priced alternatives because they do not bear the full cost of their health care consumption. In turn, producers lack incentives to...

Health insurance premiums often do not reflect individual health risks, implying redistribution from individuals with low health risks to individuals with high health risks. This paper studies whether more cost-sharing leads to less redistribution and to lower welfare of high-risk individuals....

Two in five Americans have medical debt, nearly half of whom owe at least $2,500. Concerned by this burden, governments and private donors have undertaken large, high-profile efforts to relieve medical debt. We partnered with RIP Medical Debt to conduct two randomized experiments that relieved...

We examine the effects of patient cost-sharing on adolescents' healthcare utilization and out-of-pocket medical expenditures by exploiting the healthcare reform in South Korea that lowered the coinsurance rate for inpatient care from 20% to 5% for children under 16. We apply a...

Patient cost-sharing is used as a tool to limit over-utilization of insured healthcare services in almost all high-income countries. We study its distributional consequences in the context of a publicly-funded universal health insurance system, where consumers (as tax-payers) are residual...

The Affordable Care Act requires insurers to offer cost sharing reductions (CSRs) to low-income consumers on the Marketplaces. We link 2013-2015 All-Payer Claims Data to 2004-2013 administrative hospital discharge data from Utah and exploit policy-driven differences in the actuarial value of CSR...

This paper studies two major changes in the financing of Part D drugs for Medicare due to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Effective 2025 it capped out of pocket (OOP) payments at $2000 per year, and effective 2026 it will pay lower prices (negotiated by Medicare) for 10 targeted costly and...

This paper performs a forensic analysis of Cisco’s transfer pricing cost sharing arrangement based on forensic economic analysis of public information, including Cisco’s SEC and foreign country regulatory filings, published materials containing insider accounts of Cisco’s operations,...

This paper performs a forensic analysis of eBay’s transfer pricing cost sharing arrangement based on forensic economic analysis of public information, including eBay’s SEC and foreign country regulatory filings, court proceedings, case studies, published materials containing insider accounts...

The growth of health care spending has been a longstanding policy concern. Over the years, several innovations have been proposed to lower levels of health care spending; however, their impact has been limited and not sustained over time. Costly new technology, while often an improvement to...

Ukraine's fight for its values and its future has become an inspiration to the democratic world. That fight comes at an unthinkable human cost, and it will likely only sharpen the expectations of a strong state capable of effectively serving its citizens, who are also taxpayers. A pressing...

Insurance for prescription drugs is characterized by two types of cost-sharing: flat copayments and variable coinsurance. We develop a theoretical model to show that refill purchases of preventive drugs (compliance) are lower under coinsurance due to the consumer's exposure to variation in drug...

Bundled insurance contracts, providing protection based on several loss coverages, are attractive because they allow insurers to focus on the needs of the policyholder. A common contract feature is a deductible set so that the insurance pays the excess over the deductible of the sum of losses...

Two in five Americans have medical debt, nearly half of whom owe at least $2,500. Concerned by this burden, governments and private donors have undertaken large, high-profile efforts to relieve medical debt. We partnered with RIP Medical Debt to conduct two randomized experiments that relieved...

Many studies have attempted to investigate the drivers of preventive behaviour. This study contributes to this strand of literature by examining the association between higher insurance deductibles in the Swiss health system and preventive behaviour that allows for maintaining a good diet,...