While a growing literature examining the relationship between income and health expenditures suggests that health care is a luxury good, this conclusion is contentiously debated due to heterogeneity of the existing results. This paper tests the luxury good hypothesis (namely that income...

This paper explores variations in the uptake of breast cancer screening and associated factors influencing utilisation of mammography screening among women aged 50 to 69 years in 13 European countries. We focus on the relative importance of individual (e.g. age, education, etc.) and...

We exploit regional variation in the availability of breast cancer screening policies and variations in age eligibility criteria across European regions to estimate the causal effect of home invitation on mammography uptake. We link administrative public data about regional breast cancer...

Between 2008 and 2012 new outpatient service locations were established in Hungarian micro-regions, which had lacked outpatient capacities before. We exploit this quasiexperiment to estimate the effect of geographical accessibility on outpatient case numbers using both semi-aggregate and...

This paper empirically assesses the relative role of health plan prices, service quality and optional benefits in the decision to choose a health plan. We link representative German SOEP panel data from 2007 to 2010 to (i) health plan service quality indicators, (ii) measures of voluntary...

The increased availability of process measures implies that quality of care is in some areas de facto verifiable. Optimal price-setting for verifiable quality is well-described in the incentive-design literature. We seek to narrow the large gap between actual price-setting behaviour in...

We investigate the welfare impact of parallel imports using a large panel data set containing monthly information on sales, ex-factory prices, and further product characteristics for all 700 anti-diabetic drugs sold in Germany between 2004 and 2010. We estimate a two-stage nested logit model of...

Provider competition is a currently popular healthcare reform model. A necessary condition for greater competition to improve quality is that providers will face higher demand if they improve their quality. In this paper we test this crucial assumption in an important part of the health care...

This paper provides field evidence on (a) how price framing affects consumers’ decision to switch health insurance plans and (b) how the price elasticity of demand for health insurance can be influenced by policymakers through simple regulatory efforts. In 2009, in order to foster...

When health insurance reforms involve non-linear price schedules tied to payment periods (for example, a quarter or a year), the empirical analysis of its effects has to take the within-period time structure of incentives into account. The analysis is further complicated when demand data are...