Before the 1930s Building and Loan Associations (B&Ls) were the leading residential mortgage leaders in the U.S. When severely distressed during the housing crisis of the 1930s, B&Ls frequently took years to liquidate. These delays in resolution resulted from the unique B&L contract that encouraged borrowing members to prolong dissolution and gave them shared control over the timing of liquidation. We estimate a hazard model of dissolution using a new dataset of New Jersey B&Ls and find that the probability of liquidation rose 37% when the share of non-borrowing members rose above two-thirds. The severe restriction on liquidity suffered by non-borrowers was instrumental to the rapid transition from the traditional B&L to the modern Savings & Loan industry during the 1930s housing crisis.

We evaluate health insurance reclassification risk in the Small Group Market before ACA community rating regulations. We use detailed claims and premiums data from a large insurance company, controlling non parametrically for selection. We find a pass-through of 11% from changes in health risk to changes in premiums, with a stronger equilibrium relationship between the two. The pricing patterns are consistent with the insurer offering “guaranteed renewability” contracts with one-sided pricing commitment. The observed pricing policy adds 55% of the consumer welfare gain from community rating relative to experience rating, with welfare gains limited because of switching across insurance companies.

We analyze dynamic incentives in pension systems created by the use of a small set of final years of earnings to compute benefits. Using social security records and household surveys from Uruguay, we show that self-employed workers and some employees of small firms respond to these incentives by increasing reported earnings in the benefit calculation window. We find evidence that suggests that these responses are explained by changes in earnings reporting and not in total earnings or labor supply. Back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate that this behavior increases the cost of pensions by about 0.2% of the GDP.