The impact of quality on the demand facing health care providers has important implications for the industrial organization of health care markets. In this paper we study the consumers' choice of general practitioner (GP) assuming they are unable to observe the true quality of GP services. A...

In Norway specialized health services are provided both by public hospitals and by privately practicing specialists who have a contract with the public sector. Patients’ co-payment is the same irrespective of the type of provider they visit. The ambition of equity in the allocation of medical...

In health economics, cost-effectiveness is defined as maximized health benefits for a given health budget. When there is a private alternative to public treatments, care must be taken when using costeffectiveness analysis to decide what types of treatments should be included in the public...

The paper examines the heterogeneity with respect to the impact of a financial reform - Activity Based Financing (ABF) - on hospital efficiency in Norway. Measures of technical efficiency and of cost-efficiency are considered. The data set is from a contiguous ten-year panel of 47 hospitals...

This dissertation consists of empirical essays within the subject of health economics. There are four essays in applied micro-econometrics and, as data in Essays 2 and 4 have a panel format, econometric methods for panel data are applied. Tobit-type models for limited dependent variables are...

In this paper, we compare and analyse the systems for financing long-term care for older people in the Scandinavian countries – Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The three countries share common political traditions of local autonomy and universalism, and these common roots are very apparent when...

A famous idea to maintain affordable health expenditures is to cut back statutory health insurance (SHI) to a basic insurance and to introduce supplementary private health insurance (PHI), permitted to cover the remaining benefits and to apply managed care mechanisms. The measure is supposed to...

The criterion of cost-effectiveness in health management may be given a welfaretheoretical justification if people are risk neutral with respect to life years. With risk aversion, the optimal allocation of health expenditures change: Compared to the costeffective allocation, more resources...

In Scandinavia, the provision of health care services has been, almost entirely, the responsibility of the public health care system. However, in the last five to seven years there has been remarkable growth in the private health care market. These health care services are obtained normally...

We investigate the effect of education Conditional Cash Transfer programs (CCTs) on teenage pregnancy. Our main concern is with how the size and sign of the effect may depend on the design of the program. Using a simple model we show that an education CCT that conditions renewal on school...