New NBER Research20 November 2009 Consolidation in the Health Insurance Industry Raises PremiumsLeemore Dafny, Mark Duggan, and Subramaniam Ramanarayanan have access to a dataset of employer-sponsored health plans enrolling over 10 million Americans annually between 1998 and 2006. They study the impact of insurance firm mergers in local markets and ask more generally whether consolidation in the U.S. health insurance industry has affected premiums. Their conclusion is that inflation-adjusted premiums increased by 2 percentage points in a typical market when insurance firms merged, and that physicians’ employment and earnings declined in the aftermath of such mergers.
( ...more... ) 19 November 2009 Investment in Energy Infrastructure and the Tax CodeGib Metcalf reviews a number of federal tax policies that provide incentives for energy investment and estimates the marginal effective tax rates for various energy capital investments as of 2007. He finds that investment in the production of wind-generated energy responds strongly to changes in tax policy and concludes that federal tax credits have played a key role in driving wind investment over the past 18 years.
( ...more... ) 18 November 2009 A Few Facts about Executive CompensationUsing data from 1993 to 2006, Gian Luca Clementi and Tom Cooley point out some important features of executive compensation in the United States. These include: a sizeable fraction of chief executives actually lose money each year; the income accruing to CEOs from the sale of stock increased during the data sample period; and, measured as dollar changes in compensation, CEO incentives have strengthened over time, but measured as percentage changes in shareholder wealth, they have not changed in any appreciable way.
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