In Germany, employees are generally obliged to participate in the public health insurance system, where coverage is universal, co-payments and deductables are moderate, and premia are based on income. However, they may buy private insurance instead if their income exceeds the compulsory...

I analyze the decisions on undertaking breast screening by women aged 50-64 in the UK. I provide estimation results on the discounting of the potential future benefits of screening. I also analyze the education di¤erences in mammography decisions,and examine the underlying mechanism how...

Why do well-educated people live longer? We use unique and high-quality data on about 50,000 monozygotic and same-sex dizygotic twins, born between 1886-1958, to address this question. We demonstrate a positive and statistically signiÂ…cant relation between years of schooling and longevity,...

In many public health care systems treatment is rationed by waiting time. We examine the optimal allocation of a .xed supply of a treatment between di¤erent groups of patients. Even in the absence of any distributional aims welfare is increased by third degree waiting time discrimination....

The optimal allocation of a public health care budget across treatments must take account of the way in which care is rationed within treatments since this will affect their marginal value. We investigate the optimal allocation rules for health care systems where user charges are fixed and care...

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...

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...