Essays in Applied Microeconomics

Abstract

This dissertation is composed of three chapters addressing topics in health and labor economics. The first chapter characterizes how various regulatory features in a large United States health insurance market, Medicare Advantage, facilitate access to high quality ``star" hospitals. Using hand-collected data, I show star hospital coverage in Medicare Advantage is high --- 70% of plans cover their county's star hospital compared to 34% in ACA exchanges. I examine two unique institutional features: (1) the presence of a public option in hospital price negotiations, the Traditional Medicare program; and (2) the mitigation of adverse selection through its stable population and well-calibrated risk adjustment system. Through estimation of demand and cost parameters, I show that the elimination of either feature would largely reduce coverage of star hospitals in the Medicare Advantage context. The second chapter of my dissertation is co-authored with Michael Geruso, Timothy Layton, and Mark Shepard. Insurance markets often feature consumer sorting along both an extensive margin (whether to buy) and an intensive margin (which plan to buy). We present a new graphical theoretical framework that extends a workhorse model to incorporate both selection margins simultaneously. A key insight from our framework is that policies aimed at addressing one margin of selection often involve an economically meaningful trade-off on the other margin in terms of prices, enrollment, and welfare. The third chapter of my dissertation is co-authored with Sabien Dobbelaere, Sándor Sóvágó, and Daniel Prinz. Using administrative data from the Netherlands, we show that workers at firms targeted by takeovers experience a large drop in the likelihood of employment at the consolidated firm, employment anywhere, and total income in the four years after the takeover. Incumbent worker job loss is a pervasive phenomenon across many types of takeovers. We show that the primary mechanism for this job loss is firm re-structuring at consolidating firms.