This paper investigates whether there is evidence of ex-ante moral hazard in health insurance—i.e., whether lower out-of-pocket costs lead to risky health behaviors. Understanding the role of ex-ante moral hazard is crucial, given that it can contribute to preventable health issues. I leverage the staggered rollout of U.S. state policies lowering insulin out-of-pocket costs and focus on privately insured households with diabetes. Using household-level grocery purchase data, I find that reduced insulin out-of-pocket costs result in increased purchases of sugar, a nutrient closely tied to insulin needs and linked to long-term health risks. Sales of diabetes supplies also rise, highlighting a shift from lifestyle management to treatment.
Governments enact climate policies while simultaneously spending a large share of their budgets purchasing goods and services from private firms. We show that this spending is not aligned with their own climate goals. Using a novel dataset spanning 2015--2024 that combines the universe of Italian procurement contracts with firm-level financial data and a measure of green investment intensity, we find that greater reliance on public procurement leads to lower green investment. This effect is stronger during periods of high decarbonization pressure and among less financially constrained firms. Taken together, these results suggest that when procurement contracts are awarded without conditioning on environmental performance, contracting firms are shielded from market-based decarbonization pressure. Consistent with a shielding mechanism of non-green public procurement, we find no negative effect on green investment when government buyers consider environmental performance at the award phase.