Testing for Adverse Selection into Private Medical Insurance

We develop a test for adverse selection and use it to examine privatehealth insurance markets. In contrast to earlier papers that consider apurely private system or a system in which private insurance supplementsa public system, we focus our attention on a system where privately fundedhealth care is substitutive of the publicly funded one. Using a model ofcompetition among insurers, we generate predictions about the correlationbetween risk and the probability of taking private insurance under bothsymmetric information and adverse selection. These predictions constitutethe basis for our adverse selection test. The theoretical model is also usefulto conclude that the setting that we focus on is especially attractive to testfor adverse selection. Using the British Household Panel Survey, we findevidence that adverse selection is present in this market. We develop a test for adverse selection and use it to examine privatehealth insurance markets. In contrast to earlier papers that consider apurely private system or a system in which private insurance supplementsa public system, we focus our attention on a system where privately fundedhealth care is substitutive of the publicly funded one. Using a model ofcompetition among insurers, we generate predictions about the correlationbetween risk and the probability of taking private insurance under bothsymmetric information and adverse selection. These predictions constitutethe basis for our adverse selection test. The theoretical model is also usefulto conclude that the setting that we focus on is especially attractive to testfor adverse selection. Using the British Household Panel Survey, we find evidence that adverse selection is present in this market

Numerical tools for the theoretical study of QCD at small x

In this contribution we present the status of two numerical tools designed to study the small x limit of QCD. The first one is a Monte Carlo simulation of the BFKL evolution equation. In design of this approach emphasis has been placed on exploiting the linear behaviour that many variants of the BFKL evolution possess. This allows us to design a procedure which can be used to study theoretical and phenomenological aspects of different kernels. The second one is a semi-analytic approach to study Lipatov's effective action which describes Reggeon interactions. The study of the properties of this action is very complicated and we propose using a computational tool to handle the large amount of non--local vertices and the derivation of higher order corrections.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures. International Workshop on Diffraction in High-Energy Physics -DIFFRACTION 2006 - September 5-10 2006 Adamantas, Milos island, Greec