June 2013
Intermediate to advanced
496 pages
19h 22m
English
Raj Chetty*,† and Amy Finkelstein†,‡, *Harvard University, †NBER, ‡MIT
We survey the literature on social insurance, focusing on recent work that has connected theory to evidence to make quantitative statements about welfare and optimal policy. Our review contains two parts. We first discuss motives for government intervention in private insurance markets, focusing primarily on selection. We review the original theoretical arguments for government intervention in the presence of adverse selection, and describe how recent work has refined and challenged the conclusions drawn from early theoretical models. We then describe empirical work that tests for selection in insurance markets, ...
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