* C h i e f A c t u a r y , Soc ia l S e c u r i t y A d m i n i s t r a t i o n . In the 1956 amendments to the Social Security Act, Congress continued its policy of making the old-age and survivors insurance program self-supporting. The amendments included provisions increasing the cost of the program, but the greater cost–except for the new disability insurance benefits–is roughly offset by ...

BACKGROUND Disease has become one of the key causes of falling into poverty in rural China. The poor households are even more likely to suffer. The New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS) has been implemented to provide rural residents financial protection against health risks. This study aims to assess the effect of the NCMS on alleviating health payment-induced poverty in the Shaanxi Province o...

Understanding how sterile worker castes in social insects first evolved is one of the supreme puzzles in social evolution. Here, we show that in the bee tribe Allodapini, the earliest societies did not entail a foraging worker caste, but instead comprised females sharing a nest with supersedure of dominance. Subordinates delayed foraging until they became reproductively active, whereupon they p...

In order to evaluate whether workers are overor under-insured through the Disability Insurance (DI) program, we develop a framework that allows us to simulate the benefits as well as the costs associated with marginal changes in payment generosity from a representative cross-sectional sample of the population. Under the assumption that individuals are reasonably risk averse, we find that the ty...

Health Insurance Benefit Mandates and the Firm-Size Distribution By 2010, the average US state had passed 37 health insurance benefit mandates (laws requiring health insurance plans to cover certain additional services). Previous work has shown that these mandates likely increase health insurance premiums, which in turn could make it more costly for firms to compensate employees. Using 1996–201...

Abstract: We study the impact of the introduction of one of the major pillars of the social insurance system in the United States: the introduction of Medicare in 1965. Our results suggest that, in its first 10 years, the establishment of universal health insurance for the elderly had no discernible impact on elderly mortality. However, we find a substantial reduction in the elderly’s exposure ...

OBJECTIVES To measure expatriates' knowledge of health insurance benefits with respect to outpatient, inpatient, prescription drug, and dental services, and to link this knowledge to sociodemographic and employment characteristic.  Methods: Cross-sectional, face-to-face interviews were conducted from March 2015 to February 2016 with a stratified random sample of 3,398 male insured expatriate wo...

This paper describes how much families know about their health insurance coverage and investigates whether consumer education and simplified benefit structures would improve knowledge. Families' perceptions about their insurance benefits were measured in two household surveys administered in six sites. Knowledge was assessed by comparing families' responses with policy data collected from the c...

Unlike children in most other economically developed countries, children in the United States are not guaranteed health insurance coverage. Indeed, many U.S. children have no health insurance coverage at all. Their lack of coverage restricts their access to health care services: uninsured children have fewer physician visits per year than children with insurance and are less likely to have a us...

This paper presents large-sample evidence that firms consider labor unemployment risk when setting their resource adjustment policies. Prior studies find that costs rise more in response to sales increases than they fall in response to sales decreases. Anderson, Banker, and Janakiraman (2003) term this phenomenon “cost stickiness” and attribute it to managers’ deliberate adjustment to committed...