One of the consequences of rapid economic growth and industrialization in the developing world has been deterioration in environmental conditions and air quality. While air pollution is a serious threat to health in most developing countries, environmental regulations are rare and the...

The paper evaluates the German health care reform of 1997, using the individual number of doctor visits as outcome measure. A new econometric model, the Probit-Poisson-log-normal model with correlated errors, describes the data better than existing count data models. Moreover, it has an...

Using SOEP panel data and difference-in-differences methods, this study is the first to empirically evaluate the effectiveness of four different health care cost containment measures within an integrated framework. The four measures investigated were introduced in Germany in 1997 to reduce moral...

This paper studies the design of health insurance with ex post moral hazard, when there is imperfect competition in the market for the medical product. Various scenarios, such as monopoly pricing, price negotiation or horizontal differentiation are considered. The insurance contract specifies...

Many developed countries have recently experienced sharp increases in home birth rates. This paper investigates the impact of home births on the health of low-risk newborns using data from the Netherlands, the only developed country where home births are widespread. To account for endogeneity in...

We investigate the impact of obstetrician supervision, as opposed to midwife supervision, on the short-term health of low-risk newborns. We exploit a unique policy rule in the Netherlands that creates a large discontinuity in the probability of a low-risk birth being attended by an obstetrician...

Although learning-by-doing is believed to be an important source of productivity growth, there is limited evidence that production volume affects productivity in a causal sense. We document evidence of learning-by-doing in a highly skilled profession where stakes are high; advanced cancer...

Social protection systems in developing countries are typically composed of a bundle of benefits, the major ones being health insurance and pensions. Benefit bundling may increase informality and decrease welfare. Indeed, if some of the benefits are valued at substantially less than their cost,...

We exploit time variation across Italian Regions in the implementation of a prospective pay systems (PPS) for hospitals based on Diagnosis Related Groups (DRGs) to assess their impact on self-assessed health status and on the use of health care services. We consider a survey of more than 600,000...

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 competition...