This study assesses the cost-effectiveness of an insurance administration-free, hospital-based clinic designed to provide a full array of primary care services to low-income individuals at little or no cost. In addition to low/no-cost visits, individuals have the option to purchase a low-cost health insurance plan similar to any traditional health plan (eg, prescriptions, primary care, specialt...

I estimate demand for auto insurance in the presence of two types of market frictions: search and switching costs. I develop an integrated utility-maximizing model in which consumers decide over which and how many companies to search and from which company to purchase. My modelling approach rationalizes observed consideration sets as being the outcomes of consumers’ search processes. I find sea...

The 2014 implementation of key provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) represents one of the largest health insurance expansions since the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. These provisions include premium tax credits for the purchase of private insurance for lowand middle-income adults and, in participating states, expanded Medicaid eligibility for adults with incomes up to 138 pe...

We examine whether long-term care (LTC) experience helps explain the low demand for long-term care insurance (LTCI). We test if expectations about future informal care receipt, expectations about inheritance receipt, and LTCI purchase decisions vary between individuals whose parents or in-laws have used LTC versus those who have not. We find parental use of a nursing home decreases expectations...

In this paper, we use feed forward neural networks with the back-propagation algorithm to build decision models for five insurances including life, annuity, health, accident, and investment-oriented insurances. Six features (variables) were selected for the inputs of the neural networks including age, sex, annual income, educational level, occupation, and risk preference. Three hundred insurant...

In this paper, we use decision trees to establish the decision models for insurance purchases. Five major types of insurances are involved in this study including life, annuity, health, accident, and investment-oriented insurances. Four decision tree methods were used to build the decision models including Chi-square Automatic Interaction Detector (CHAID), Exhaustive Chi-square Automatic Intera...

Agricultural contracts and crop insurance are important ways for farmers to mitigate risks in modern U.S. agriculture. In this paper, we investigate the effect of crop insurance enrollment on farmers’ participation of marketing contracts. Following Ligon (2003), we setup a mechanism design framework to demonstrate an integrator’s contract design problem where farmers are assumed to be expected ...

The charter-protected right of all Canadians to purchase private medical and hospital services and insurance for medically required services was implied in the 2005 landmark judgment of the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) case involving Chaoulli/Zeliotis vs Quebec and Canada. This precedent-setting judgment is now part of Canadian case law and jurisprudence. In this SCC case, two sections of Queb...

Our model addresses selection at the extensive margin and abstracts from intensive margin selection amongst differentiated plan. Our modeling decision follows naturally from the policy intervention, the individual mandate, which affects the demand for health insurance in general. While our framework may not be accurate in other contexts, we think that the modeling assumptions are sensible in th...

Disruptive events that halt production can have severe business consequences if not appropriately managed. Business interruption (BI) insurance offers firms a financial mechanism for managing their exposure to disruption risk. Firms can also avail of operational measures to manage the risk. In this paper we explore the relationship between BI insurance and operational measures. We model a manuf...