The economic crisis that started in 2008 has had a profound impact on the lives of citizens. Millions of people lost their job, saw their life-savings disappear and experienced prolonged financial hardship. The economic crisis has also led a number of OECD governments to introduce austerity...

Under Medicare Part D, senior citizens choose prescription drug insurance offred by numerous private insurers. We examine non-poor enrollees' actions in 2006 and 2007 using panel data. Our sample reduced overspending by $298 on average, with gains by 81% of them. The greatest improvements were...

El súbito desplome de la recaudación tributaria, tras un largo periodo de acelerado crecimiento del gasto sanitario público, ha hecho aflorar las tensiones financieras subyacentes. Dadas las sombrías perspectivas de crecimiento económico disponibles para España, cabe preguntarse si la...

Health expenditures as a share of GDP in the United States have more than tripled over the past half-century. A common conjecture is that this is a consequence of rising income. We investigate this hypothesis by instrumenting for local area income with time series variation in oil prices...

In the case of natural monopolies there tends to be a trade-off between a higher quality of output provided by private firms, and a better access for poor consumers provided by public firms. This is partly the reflection of differences in objectives by private and public firms. The former tend...

Le applicazioni dell’ICT in sanità sono note con il termine sanità elettronica o e-health che indica tutto ciò che è legato alle tecnologie informatiche e di telecomunicazione e alla medicina. Le soluzioni e-health in Italia includono sia strumenti per le amministrazioni e i professionisti...

Many governments have enacted health cost-containment policies in recent years, and many are currently considering further reform alternatives to tackle growing health spending and promote efficiency in the health system, particularly in light of projections regarding future cost pressures in...

This note considers a relatively new form of financing for social services, the "Social Impact Bond." Proponents of Social Impact Bonds argue that they present a solution to several problems in funding social services, including performance measurement and the distribution of risk. Using a...

We estimate the degree of supplier-induced demand for newborn treatment by exploiting changes in reimbursement arising from the introduction of the partial prospective payment system (PPS) in Japan. Under the partial PPS, neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) utilization became relatively more...

Because individuals aged 55-64 face large and uncertain medical expenditures without the guarantee of public insurance coverage provided by Medicare, the availability of post-retirement health insurance could be an important determinant in the retirement decisions of this group. We investigate...