The present Paper investigates political constraints that may impair attempts to reform payment schemes of a given profession. When the good produced (e.g. health care) is imperfectly observable by the payer (e.g. health insurance), asymmetries of information limit the possibility to base...

This paper provides an analysis of the health insurance and health care consumption. A structural microeconomic model of joint demand for health insurance and health care is developed and estimated using full maximum likelihood method using Swiss insurance claims data for over 60,000 adult...

We investigate the presence of moral hazard and advantageous or adverse selection in a market for supplementary health insurance. For this we specify and estimate dynamic models for health insurance decisions and health care utilization. Estimates of the health care utilization models indicate...

This Paper exploits a unique micro-level data set on primary health care facilities in Uganda to address the question: What motivates religious not-for-profit (RNFP) health care providers? We use two approaches to identify whether an altruistic (religious) effect exists in the data. First,...

This proposal involves the establishment of ‘welfare accounts’ for every person in a country. There are four accounts: a retirement account (covering pensions), an unemployment account (covering unemployment support), a human capital account (covering education and training), and a health...

The health care professions in Europe have been subject to substantial entry and conduct regulation. Most notably, pharmacies have frequently received high regulated markups over wholesale costs, and have been protected from additional competition through geographic entry restrictions. We...

In this paper, we propose an alternative methodology for ranking hospitals based on the choices of Medical School graduates over hospital training vacancies. Our methodology is therefore a revealed preference approach. Our methodology for measuring relative hospital quality has the following...

We study the contribution of health-related behaviors to the health-education gradient by distinguishing between short-run and long-run mediating effects: while in the former only current or lagged behaviors are taken into account, in the latter we consider the entire history of behaviors. We...

We estimate the causal effect of early retirement on mortality for blue-collar workers. To overcome the problem of endogenous selection, we exploit an exogenous change in unemployment insurance rules in Austria that allowed workers in eligible regions to withdraw from the workforce up to 3.5...

Research increasingly shows that differences in endowments at birth need not be genetic but instead are influenced by environmental factors while the fetus is in the womb. In addition, these differences may persist well beyond childhood. In this paper, we study one such environmental factor –...