Bunching at the kink: Implications for spending responses to health insurance contracts
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Finkelstein_Bunching at the kink.pdf
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1.99 MB
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Author(s)
Einav, Liran
Finkelstein, Amy
Schrimpf, Paul
Date Issued
February 2017
Journal
Journal of Public Economics
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Citation
Einav, Liran, Amy Finkelstein, and Paul Schrimpf. “Bunching at the Kink: Implications for Spending Responses to Health Insurance Contracts.” Journal of Public Economics 146 (February 2017): 27–40.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
A large literature in empirical public finance relies on “bunching” to identify a behavioral response to non-linear incentives and to translate this response into an economic object to be used counterfactually. We conduct this type of analysis in the context of prescription drug insurance for the elderly in Medicare Part D, where a kink in the individual's budget set generates substantial bunching in annual drug expenditure around the famous “donut hole.” We show that different alternative economic models can match the basic bunching pattern, but have very different quantitative implications for the counterfactual spending response to alternative insurance contracts. These findings illustrate the importance of modeling choices in mapping a compelling reduced form pattern into an economic object of interest. Keywords: Bunching, Medicare, Health insurance, Health care
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1016/J.JPUBECO.2016.11.011
