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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Insurance, Self-Protection, And The Economics Of Terrorism, Darius Lakdawalla, George Zanjani
Insurance, Self-Protection, And The Economics Of Terrorism, Darius Lakdawalla, George Zanjani
Darius N. Lakdawalla
This paper investigates the rationale for public intervention in the terrorism insurance market. It argues that government subsidies for terror insurance are aimed, in part, at discouraging self-protection and limiting the negative externalities associated with self-protection. Cautious self-protective behavior by a target can hurt public goods like national prestige if it is seen as “giving in” to the terrorists, and may increase the loss probabilities faced by others by encouraging terrorists to substitute toward more vulnerable targets. We argue that these externalities are essential for normative analysis of government intervention and may also explain why availability problems in this market …
A Theory Of Health Disparities And Medical Technology, Darius Noshir Lakdawalla, Dana Goldman
A Theory Of Health Disparities And Medical Technology, Darius Noshir Lakdawalla, Dana Goldman
Darius N. Lakdawalla
Better-educated people are healthier, although the sources of this relationship remain unclear. Starting with basic principles of consumer theory, we develop a model of how health disparities are determined that does not depend on the precise causal mechanism. Improvements in the productivity of health care disproportionately benefit the heaviest health care users. Since richer patients tend to use the most health care, this suggests that new technologies—by making more diseases treatable, reducing the price of health care, or improving health care productivity—could widen socioeconomic disparities in health. An exception to this rule, however, is a simplifying technology, which can contract …