题 目：Multimarket Contact in Health Insurance: Evidence from Medicare Advantage

报告人：Haizhen Lin   Associate Professor       Indiana University

主持人：宋华盛  教授    浙江大学经济学院

时 间：2018年7月6日（周五）  14:00―15:30

地 点：浙江大学玉泉校区经济学院418室  

Abstract:

Many industries, including health insurance, are characterized by a handful of large firms that compete in multiple geographic markets. Such overlap across markets, defined as multimarket contact (MMC), may facilitate tacit collusion and thus reduce the intensity of competition. We examine the effects of MMC on health insurance prices and quality using comprehensive data on the Medicare Advantage (MA) market from 2008 through 2015. Our estimation strategy exploits two plausibly exogenous changes to MMC: 1) a merger-induced change in MMC due to consolidations in other markets; and 2) reimbursement policy changes in which benchmark rates were increased in a subset of markets, encouraging additional entry into those markets and therefore affecting MMC even in markets otherwise unaffected by the policy itself. Across a range of estimates and alternative measures of MMC, our results consistently support the mutual forbearance hypothesis, where we find that prices are significantly higher and hiqh-quality plans less pervasive as MMC increases. These results suggest MMC as one potential channel through which MA policy and cross-market consolidations could alter competitiveness in local markets otherwise unaffected by the policy or merger.

报告人简介：

Haizhen Lin 是印第安纳大学凯利商学院副教授，其研究成果发表在International Economic Review, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Health Economics, Journal of Industrial Economics 等国际一流期刊。

CRPE秘书处
2018-7-2