2021 "Best Paper Prize" Awarded

We are pleased to announce the following paper has been awarded the 2021 "Best Paper Prize" by the award committee:

"Labor market sorting and health insurance system design" by Naoki Aizawa, Quantitative Economics, Volume 10, Issue 4 (November 2019).

The “Best Paper” prize alternates yearly between Quantitative Economics and Theoretical Economics. The single paper winner is selected from all papers published in the corresponding journal during the previous two years by an external committee appointed by the President of the Society. 

Abstract

The paper develops and estimates a life-cycle equilibrium labor search model in which heterogeneous firms determine health insurance provisions and heterogeneous workers sort themselves into jobs with different compensation packages over the life cycle. The author studies the optimal joint design of major policies in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the implications of targeting these policies to certain individuals. Compared with the health insurance system under the ACA, the optimal structure lowers the tax benefit of employer-sponsored health insurance and makes individual insurance more attractive to younger workers. Through changes in firms’ insurance provisions, a greater number of younger workers sort into individual markets, which contributes to improving the risk pool in individual insurance and lowering the uninsured risk.

https://www.qeconomics.org/ojs/index.php/qe/article/view/700

Thank you to the "Best Paper Prize" committee members Jose Victor Rios Rull (Chair), Francesca Molinari, and Jean-Marc Robin for their work on behalf of the Econometric Society.