Research
Health Insurance Design Meets Saving Incentives: Consumer Responses to Complex Contracts
To lower health care costs, Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) offer tax incentives encouraging people to trade off current consumption against future consumption. This paper tests whether consumers use HSAs as self-insurance over the life cycle.
Has Mortality Risen Disproportionately for the Least Educated?
Two Batten professors examine whether the least educated population groups experienced the worst mortality trends at the beginning of the 21st century by measuring changes in mortality across education quartiles.
Wage Insurance and Labor Market Trajectories
Wage insurance provides income support to displaced workers who find reemployment at a lower wage. This group of scholars study the effects of the wage insurance provisions of the US Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program using administrative data from the state of Virginia. What they find suggests that wage insurance eligibility increases short-run employment probabilities and that wage insurance and TAA training may yield similar long-run effects on employment and earnings.
New Case: Losses (and Gains) from Health Reform for Non-Medicaid Uninsureds
This article examines how the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would change financial resources for and transfers to the previously uninsured if they were to purchase coverage in the ACA insurance exchanges (marketplaces) in 2014. The results suggest that the law provides gains to some, relative to their spending in the pre-ACA period, particularly those in poor health and with very low incomes, but it also potentially imposes financial losses on many, again compared to their experience when uninsured.
A Cautionary Tale in Comparative Effectiveness Research: Perils and Pitfalls of Observational Data Analysis
Health care costs represent a nearly 18% of U.S. gross domestic product and 20% of government spending. While there is detailed information on where these health care dollars are spent, there is much less evidence on how this spending affects health.
Dying to Win? Olympic Gold Medals and Longevity
Contrary to conventional wisdom, winners die over one year earlier than losers