We study how the optimal public provision of health care depends on whether or not individuals have an option to seek publicly financed treatment in other regions. We find that, relative to the first-best solution, the government has an incentive to over-provide health care to low-income...

This thesis consists of a summary and four papers. The first two concerns health care and sickness absence, and the last two pharmaceutical costs and prices. <p> Paper [I] presents an economic federation model which resembles the situation in, for example, Sweden. In the model the state governments...</p>

Based on data from a panel of the Swedish municipalities during 1993-2004, the effects of public health care expenditure on absence from work due to sickness or disability were studied using an instrumental variable method. Public health care expenditure had no significant effect on absence due...

What has been the effect of competition from parallel imports on prices of locally-sourced on-patent drugs? Did the 2002 Swedish mandatory substitution reform increase this competition? To answer these questions, we carried out difference-in-differences estimation on monthly data for a panel of...

Given the cost of trade and availability of pharmaceuticals, the driving force for parallel trade is the price difference between the source (exporting) and the destination (importing) country. An increase in the price difference or in the availability of pharmaceuticals for parallel trade...

The market share for parallel imports when pharmacies can negotiate discounts with parallel traders and sellers of locally sourced products is analyzed both theoretically and empirically. The theoretical model shows that, with discount negotiations, pharmacies will sell locally sourced products...

This paper reports on a study of the prescribing physician's influence on consumers' choice between medically equivalent pharmaceuticals. The study was performed using a dataset of 666,000 observations in which consumers were asked whether they were prepared to pay the price difference in order...

The price effects of the Swedish pharmaceutical substitution reform are analyzed using data for a panel of all pharmaceutical product sold in Sweden in 1997—2007. The price reduction due to the reform was estimated to average 10% and was found to be significantly larger for brand name...

This paper analyses how market shares for brand name drugs are affected by generic competition. The analysis is based on micro data for twelve original drugs, wich are all subject to generic competition. For five of these drugs, we find that the price of the original relative to the average...

This paper analyzes the impact of uncertainty concerning product quality of generic drugs on the substitution behavior of prescribing physicians. It is shown that uncertainty about the generic drug quality gives the physician a value of waiting for more information before switching to the...