In many countries, the social insurance system is under pressure from an ageing population. An increasing number of people are on sickness benefits and disability pensions in Norway. The general practitioner (GP) is responsible for assessing work capacity and issuing certificates for sick leave...

This paper analyses the impact of economic conditions and access to primary health care on health outcomes in Norway. Total mortality rates, grouped into four causes of death, were used as proxies for health, and the number of general practitioners (GPs) at the municipality level was used as the...

This paper studies the effect of improved neonatal health care on mortality and long run academic achievement in school. We use the idea that medical treatments often follow rules of thumb for assigning care to patients, such as the classification of Very Low Birth Weight (VLBW), which assigns...

This paper analyses the design of hospital reimbursement in an industry with imperfect competition, scarcity of labour and socially costly government transfers. We find that prospective payment not only increases the quantity of hospital care, but also the quality if quality improvements are...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the interplay between public and private health care. We consider a situation where public and private health care are perfect substitutes, and the government sets the wage in the public sector and the subsidy to (or taxation on) the private sector. Each...

Many publicly funded health systems use prospective activity-based financing to increase hospital production and efficiency. The aim of this study is to investigate whether price changes for different treatments affect the mix of activity provided by hospitals. We exploit variations in prices...

We test whether a demand response by patients exists in the Norwegian primary care sector. In Norway, physicians are remunerated either by salary or by incentive contract, and we have access to a large data survey that allows us to study the relationship between consumer satisfaction with...

We present a model of optimal contracting between a purchaser and a provider of health services when quality has two dimensions. We assume that one dimension of quality is veri?able (dimension 1) and one dimension is not verifiable (dimension 2). We show that the power of the incentive scheme...

We study the competitive effects of restricting direct access to secondary care by gatekeeping, focusing on the informational role of gatekeeping general practitioners (GPs). We consider a secondary care market with two hospitals choosing the quality and specialisation of their care. GPs...

We study effects of direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) in a market with two pharmaceutical firms providing horizontally differentiated (branded) drugs. Patients varying in their susceptability to medication are a priori uninformed of available medication. Physicians making the prescription...