Almost 4.7 million nonelderly adults and children of the seven million Californians who were uninsured for all or part of 2009 will be eligible for insurance as a result of last year’s health care reform legislation, according to new data from the 2009 California Health Interview Survey (CHIS 2009). Eligible Californians will obtain coverage either through Medi-Cal or through subsidies to purchase private health insurance in the new California Health Benefit Exchange (CHBE) starting in 2014. The CHBE will also be open to 1.2 million uninsured persons who do not qualify for subsidized premiums due to their income exceeding eligibility levels, but who will benefit from the new marketplace created through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). Just over one million uninsured persons do not qualify to participate in either the CHBE or in the Medi-Cal expansion due to their citizenship status. With seven million uninsured residents of California in 2009, the new insurance options made available by the PPACA could face challenges in enrolling these uninsured individuals.

This dissertation contains three essays on monetary and international economics. In the first chapter, I study massive drops in household consumption during large devaluations associated with sudden stops. Using cross-country comparison and the Mexican 1994-peso crisis as a case study provides evidence that, unexpectedly, non-tradable consumption decreases as much as tradable. Then, employing micro-data, I show that the previous result is motivated by high-income households who concentrate their expenditure on non-tradable. Moreover, expenditure share in non-tradable increases with income level, reflecting non-homotheticities. Based on this evidence, I build a new open economy framework that combines a Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian structure and non-homothetic CES preferences and allows for reconciling micro and macro evidence of the Mexican 1994-peso crisis. Moreover, a novel result emerges: The propagation of disturbances across economic sectors through household consumption decisions is asymmetric, depressing production more when it starts in the tradable sector.

In the second chapter (with Bernardo Candia and Youyou Xu), we use detailed microdata from Chile to analyze the role of currency invoicing for exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) at the border and the store at different time horizons. At the border, we find a predominant role for the USD for ERPT; however, bilateral exchange rates matter for longer time horizons. For imports, the bilateral ERPT is higher for consumption goods, while for exports, it is higher for non-consumption goods. Next, at the store, we show that exchange rate fluctuations do not affect retail prices on impact, consistent with sticky prices set in the consumer's currency. For longer time horizons, as nominal rigidities ease, bilateral and USD exchange rates affect store prices at a lower rate than at the border.

In the third chapter (with Luis Felipe Cespedes and Patricio Toro), we study whether changes in market competition were a significant driver of the post-pandemic global inflation episode. We empirically assess how firm's markups reacted to high inflation episodes in the last two decades and whether local markets' competitiveness can explain this relationship beyond changes in demand. Using detailed microdata for OECD countries and a staggered difference-in-difference approach, we show that the last inflation episode was different from previous ones. Markups reacted more, and changes in demand were less significant in explaining this reaction. Instead, market competitiveness appears to have played a more significant role through larger firms in relatively more concentrated sectors, which increased less in jurisdictions with stricter antitrust regulations.

Mating and territorial behavior have important fitness consequences. In this thesis, I investigate some processes that affect mating and territoriality in damselflies of the genus Hetaerina. In the first chapter, I carried out an experiment to mimic the initial stage of female color polymorphism, which is hypothesized to be maintained by negative frequency-dependent selection caused by male mating harassment. I tested how males respond to novel female color in a non-polymorphic species, Hetaerina capitalis, and the results supported the mating harassment-based hypotheses. In the second chapter, I experimentally evaluate the ability of rubyspot damselflies to discriminate between neighbors and non-neighbors. Specifically, I tested whether the dear enemy phenomenon (DEP) or a nasty neighbor effect (NNE) governs how territorial males respond to intruders. Two of the three species tested exhibited DEP, but one uses location cues to discriminate intruders while the other uses individual recognition.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA) restricts its health insurance expansions in ways that exclude many uninsured children in California who are immigrants or have immigrant parents. These exclusions directly limit coverage options for noncitizen children. And immigrant parents, potentially misinterpreting eligibility requirements for these new programs, may not enroll their citizen children. Using the 2007 California Health Interview Survey (CHIS 2007), this policy brief estimates that of the 1.08 million children in California who were uninsured all or part of the year, between 180,000 to 220,000 will be excluded from the health care reform expansions due to the combined direct and potential indirect effects of these exclusions. This "left-out" group comprises between 17% and 20% of all uninsured children in California. In light of these exclusions, California’s community clinics and public hospitals could continue to serve a significant number of uninsured immigrant children even after full implementation of ACA.

This policy note explores disparities in access to pediatric subspecialty care in California by insurance coverage, geographic location, race/ethnicity, and language. Using the available literature and interviews with stakeholders, it identifies barriers to access, which include a potential shortage of trained pediatric subspecialists, gaps in care delivery, low reimbursement rates and payment levels, and lack of care integration. Innovative care delivery models for improving the capacity of pediatric subspecialty care, including expanded use of technology, team models of care, and standard care processes, are also examined.

Among the recommendations proposed to ensure adequate access to pediatric subspecialty care: increase the number of pediatricians specializing in pediatric subspecialties; address payment and reimbursement issues that impede the access of children with special health care needs (CSHCN) to pediatric subspecialty care; increase the capacity of pediatric subspecialists by better utilizing physician extenders and general pediatricians; improve access to telehealth services for pediatric subspecialty providers; improve the availability of pediatric subspecialty services to underserved populations; improve communication between general pediatricians and providers; develop benchmarks and collect accurate data on workforce supply; and assess the standards of care available to CSHCN in California.