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...

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...

I denne rapporten beskrives trekk ved utviklingen i bruk, tilgjengelighet og fornøydhet med fastlegetjenesten etter at den ble etablert i 2001. Datamaterialet som er benyttet, er en kobling av Statistisk sentralbyrås (SSB) levekårsundersøkelser og fastlegedatabasen til Arbeids- og...

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...

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate on population aging and growth in health expenditures. The Red Herring hypothesis, i.e., that hospital expenditures are driven by the occurrence of mortal illnesses, and not patients’ age, forms the basis of the study. The data applied in...

Denne rapporten skal i følge oppdraget fra ESO gi en oversiktlig beskrivelse og diskusjon av problemer i helsesektorene i de nordiske land. Diskusjonen legger større vekt på bredde enn på dybde. Oversiktlige beskrivelser kombinert med teori kan bidra med innsikt for lesere som ikke vet så...

We study the impact of competition on primary care physicians’specialty referrals. Our data come from a Norwegian survey in 2008-9 and Statistics Norway. From the data we construct three measures of competition the number of open primary physician practices with and without population...

We study whether the information patients have about physician quality when they choose a physician, influences their probability of switching physicians. We also study whether a physician with unfavorable characteristics, as perceived by patients (ex post), can compensate for patient switching...