• Graduate program
  • Research
  • News
  • Events
    • Summer School
      • Climate Change
      • Gender in Society
      • Inequalities in Health and Healthcare
      • Business Data Science Summer School Program
      • Receive updates
    • Events Calendar
    • Events Archive
    • Tinbergen Institute Lectures
    • Conference: Consumer Search and Markets
    • Annual Tinbergen Institute Conference
  • Summer School
    • Climate Change
    • Gender in Society
    • Inequalities in Health and Healthcare
    • Business Data Science Summer School Program
    • Receive updates
  • Alumni
  • Magazine
Home | Events Archive | Adverse Selection and Insurer Participation in Health Insurance Markets
Seminar

Adverse Selection and Insurer Participation in Health Insurance Markets


  • Location
    Theil C2-1 and Zoom
    Rotterdam
  • Date and time

    May 12, 2022
    15:00 - 16:00


Market-based health insurance programs rely on robust insurer participation to function well. We develop a model of a health insurance market with adverse selection where insurer participation is endogenous. We show that when low-cost consumers also tend to be highly price sensitive - the key feature of adverse selection - insurers often lose money at their profit-maximizing prices, even without fixed costs. Adverse selection (like fixed costs) generates strong incentives for insurers to undercut each other's prices, leading to equilibria with few surviving competitors - and in the extreme, to natural monopoly. Using data from Massachusetts' health insurance exchange, we leverage exogenous subsidy-driven variation in health plan prices to estimate high consumer price sensitivity and strong adverse selection. Using an estimated structural model, we find price sensitivity and adverse selection strong enough to lead to only monopoly or duopoly in equilibrium, absent corrective policies. We show how corrective policies, including price floors and risk adjustment, can restore equilibria with greater insurer participation and higher consumer welfare.

This event will take place in hybrid form. Join the zoom session here:

https://eur-nl.zoom.us/j/91736140287
Meeting ID: 917 3614 0287