Overview
Economist at the University of Virginia. Research focuses on the design of social insurance programs — particularly disability insurance, long-term care insurance, and annuities — with emphasis on how precautionary saving motives and risk heterogeneity shape insurance demand and program value.
Key Contributions / Features
- Nonhealth risk and DI value (Deshpande and Lockwood 2022): Co-developed a sufficient-statistics welfare framework for measuring the value of U.S. disability insurance. Key finding: 63% of DI's insurance value derives from nonhealth financial risk (mass layoffs, evictions, foreclosures) rather than health-severity targeting; selective application via the SGA earnings limit — not SSA's award process — is the mechanism generating program value. MVPF ≈ 1.42 for DI reforms vs. 0.61 for UI reforms. See Nonhealth Risk and DI Insurance Value.
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