Analysis of adverse selection and moral hazard in the health insurance market of Iran

Abstract

This paper aims to estimate a demand model for health insurance and medical care in Iran, in the presence of heterogeneous and latent health status of individuals; moreover it tests the asymmetry of information in the health insurance market. Our data set have been taken from the Households expenditures survey (2006) of Iran. Parameters of the model are estimated by the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) and the presence of asymmetric information (adverse selection and moral hazard) is tested by a non-parametric econometric method. The analytical model is specified under minimal assumptions on the selection process of different insurance categories and the statistical distribution of individual's latent health status. The findings confirm the presence of adverse selection hypothesis in personally purchased health insurance and moral hazard in all health insurance categories. © 2010 The International Association for the Study of Insurance Economics.