The effect of health insurance on consumption risk depends in part on how it interacts with other risks beyond health care cost risk, such as income risk. Using a variety of approaches, I find that for U.S. households, the interaction with other risks transforms the risk protection from health insurance. Standard contracts amplify the impact of other risks, due to both subsidizing normal goods and undoing the protection against other risks from discounts, charity care, and bad debt. Alternative contracts that account for other risks, such as contracts that limit out-of-pocket spending relative to income, can provide better risk protection.

Using panel data on a 20% random sample of Canadian taxpayers, we study behavioral responses to the cancellation of a lifetime capital gains exemption that resulted in increased capital gains taxation for some individuals. We show that the exemption did not change the number of taxpayers reporting positive capital gains, and thus unlikely resulted in increased participation in capital markets. Furthermore, our results suggest that the cancellation increased the long-run capital gains realizations of tax filers with more unused exemption room but had a small, statistically insignificant impact on the capital gains realizations of those with little unused exemption room.

Economics papers increasingly report balance, pretrend, placebo, and other “sniff tests,” rejection of which is bad news for authors, undermining the credibility of their main results. We derive nonparametric bounds on the latent proportion of significant sniff tests removed by the publication process (whether by p-hacking or relegation to the file drawer) and the proportion whose significance was due to true misspecification, not bad luck. Using a hand-collected sample of nearly 30,000 sniff tests, we estimate a removal rate of more than 30% for balance tests in randomized controlled trials and a misspecification rate of more than 40% for other tests.

Relative intergenerational mobility declined for cohorts born around 1960 compared to those born around 1950. The former entered the labor market after the rise in inequality around 1980, while the latter entered the labor market earlier. We show that the rank-rank slope rose from 0.25 to 0.36 and the intergenerational elasticity increased from 0.28 to 0.45. These increases are more pronounced for men than for women. Increases in returns to schooling and in the gradient in the likelihood of marriage by parent income are contributors to increased intergenerational persistence.

We study the influence of workplace peers on a high-stakes, irreversible retirement plan choice. Midcareer U.S. military personnel choose between higher future pension payouts or an immediate bonus plus lower future payouts. With peers defined as those who have locked in their choices and personnel assignment rules ensuring that peer groups are exogenously formed, we capture the causal impact of peers. Greater peer take-up of the bonus, which is difficult to compare to the alternative plan but often extremely costly over one’s lifetime, discourages choosers from selecting the bonus. Peers have special impact within professional, race, and gender groups.

Consignment auctions are two-stage mechanisms to (re)allocate emission permits. Firms are first endowed with permits and then allowed to trade them. We determine theoretically endowments that enable efficient allocation, subject to incentive compatibility, individual rationality, and no deficit. All firms prefer efficient consignment auctions to efficient standard auctions, making them politically palatable. Firms’ investment incentives align with the first-best in efficient consignment auctions. Grandfathering based on efficient long-run allocations induces efficiency-permitting endowments. A simple calibration to data from Southern California’s RECLAIM program validates our no-deficit assumption and shows that grandfathering provides the best theoretical match for the empirically observed endowments.

Pharmacy benefit managers dominate the U.S. pharmaceutical market but are controversial and poorly understood. We analyze PBMs as market intermediaries that operate formulary contests in which on-patent brand-drug makers compete for favorable placement by offering rebates off list price. These formulary contests deliver efficiency gains compared to drug makers selling directly to consumers; PBMs capture some of these gains. Our approach answers key questions regarding the determinants of efficiency, rebates, list prices, and PBM market power in the pharmaceutical market. Our analysis also explains how common contracting practices, federal regulations, and incentives within formulary contests can undermine market efficiency.