Dr. Dániel Prinz

We analyze how shutdown policies affected unemployment during the COVID-19 pandemic. We use proxy data from Google Trends to disentangle the effects of six policies. State-level policies caused 12.4% of unemployment insurance claims early on. Restaurant limits and non-essential business closures had modest effects. Other policies (e.g. stay-at-home orders, school closures) had no additional effect.

There is substantial geographic heterogeneity in healthcare spending in Hungary. Labor income is positively associated with public healthcare spending. Positive relation between income and healthcare spending also exists within counties. Labor income is negatively associated with mortality.

We study insurers' use of prescription drug formularies to screen consumers in the ACA Health Insurance exchanges. We begin by showing that exchange risk adjustment and reinsurance succeed in neutralizing selection incentives for most, but not all, consumer types. A minority of consumers, identifiable by demand for particular classes of prescription drugs, are predictably unprofitable. We then show that contract features relating to these drugs are distorted in a manner consistent with multidimensional screening. The empirical findings support a long theoretical literature examining how insurance contracts offered in equilibrium can fail to optimally trade off risk protection and moral hazard.