Victoria Marone

PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS

When Should There be Vertical Choice in Health Insurance Markets? with Adrienne Sabety. January 2022. American Economic Review, 112 (1): 304-42. [Online Appendix] [Replication Materials] 

•  Summary on Microeconomic Insights

Regulating Markups in U.S. Health Insurance with Steve Cicala and Ethan Lieber. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2019. [Online Appendix] [Replication Materials]

Narrow Networks on the Health Insurance Marketplaces: Prevalence, Pricing, And The Cost Of Network Breadth with Leemore Dafny, Igal Hendel, and Christopher Ody. Health Affairs, September 2017.      

OTHER PUBLICATIONS

All Medicaid Expansions Are Not Created Equal: The Geography and Targeting of the Affordable Care Act with Craig Garthwaite, John Graves, Tal Gross, Zeynal Karaca, and Matthew Notowidigdo. Brookings Institute, September 2019. [NBER Working Paper No. 26289]

Oscar Health Insurance: What Lies Ahead for a Unicorn Insurance Entrant? with Leemore Dafny. Harvard Business School Case 319-025, August 2018 (Revised August 2019). 

WORKING PAPERS

Multidimensional Screening and Menu Design in Health Insurance Markets with Hector Chade, Amanda Starc, and Jeroen Swinkles [December 2023]

WORK IN PROGRESS

Market Design in Single-Payer Healthcare: Evidence from a GP Allocation System with Ingrid Huitfeldt and Daniel Waldinger

Abstract: Many centralized assignment systems seek to not only provide good matches for participants' current needs, but also accommodate changing preferences and circumstances. We study the problem of designing such a system in the context of Norway's system for assigning patients to general practitioners (GPs). We provide direct evidence of misallocation under the current system––patients sitting on waitlists for each others' doctors, but who cannot trade––and propose an alternative mechanism that adapts the Top-Trading Cycles algorithm to a dynamic environment. We then estimate a structural model of switching behavior and GP choice and empirically evaluate how this mechanism would perform relative to the status quo. We estimate modest differences in overall GP desirability and a substantial degree of horizontal differentiation. As a result, introducing Top-Trading Cycles would dramatically reduce average wait times. Finally, we explore distributional consequences and implications for justified envy.

The Risk Protection Value of Moral Hazard with Angie Acquatella

Abstract: Standard health insurance contracts lower the marginal out-of-pocket price of healthcare utilization, and it is well-established that this leads to higher consumption of healthcare ("moral hazard"). Relative to insurance that does not distort the marginal price of care, standard contracts therefore provide consumers additional utility in the form of incremental healthcare consumption. If incremental care is differentially valuable in different health states, it can serve as a mechanism for transferring utility across states of the world. We show that moral hazard therefore directly interacts with the value of risk protection derived from insurance. In particular, if the value of incremental care is higher in sick rather than healthy states, the consumer will face less payoff uncertainty overall. Under standard parameterizations of demand for healthcare and health insurance, the reduction in payoff uncertainty driven by the effects of moral hazard accounts for as much as 25 percent of the total value of risk protection derived from insurance. As a result, insurance contracts that do not distort the marginal price of care may be less socially efficient than standard contracts that permit moral hazard.

Winners and Losers Under Counterfactual Health Risk Pooling with Benjamin Vatter                                                                                                 

Optimal Insurance for Healthcare Amenities with Ingrid Huitfeldt

The Distributional Effects of Cost-Sharing in a Universal Healthcare System with Simon Bensnes and Ingrid Huitfeldt                                                                                          

TEACHING

ECO 325K Health Economics – Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Spring 2024 (undergraduate)