Econ 309 Social Insurance

Unemployment Insurance (UI)

What happens to people when their unemployment insurance runs out?  (Slate, December 30, 2010)

Does unemployment insurance cause people to look less hard for jobs?  Maybe not.  (Matthew Yglesias, Slate, November 22, 2011)

Disability Insurance (DI)

Workers Compensation (WC)

Why aren't insurance markets like markets for most other goods?  

READ:

Uwe Reinhardt on Kenneth Arrow's contributions to health economics (New York Times, August 13, 2010)

Nobel Prize winner Kenneth Arrow's seminal paper, "Uncertainty and the welfare economics of medical care". The American Economic Review 1963;53:941-73.  

Lawrence Summers (Arrow's nephew), "Some Simple Economics of Mandated Benefits", The American Economics Review,  1989; 70:2, 177-183.

For interest:  

Liran Einav and Amy Finkelstein, "Selection in Insurance Markets:  Theory and Empirics in Pictures", Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2011

For amusement:

• Pirates used to get disability insurance 

  • Leeson, Peter T. "An-arrghchy: The Law and Economics of Pirate Organization." Journal of Political Economy 115, no. 6 (2007): 1049–1094. pg 1066 

  • The pirate code...which is more of a guideline, really.