Sickness absence has risen over the past years in Norway. One explanation put forward is that a tougher labor market represents a health hazard, while a competing hypothesis predicts that loss of job security works as a disciplinary device. In this analysis we aim to trace a causal impact of...

Using registry data on every employed Norwegian woman giving birth to her first child during the period 1995–2008, we describe patterns of certified and paid sick leave before, during and after pregnancy. By following the same women over time, we can explore how observed sick leave patterns...

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...

The right to equal treatment, irrespective of age, gender, ethnicity, socio-economic status and place of resident, is an important principle for several health care systems. A reform of the Norwegian hospital sector may be used as a relevant experiment for investigating whether centralization of...

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...

Objective: Targeting hospital treatment at patients with high priority would seem to be a natural policy response to the growing gap between what can be done and what can be financed in the specialist health care sector. The paper examines the distributionalconsequences of this policy. Method:...

We analyze and compare inequity in use of physician visits (GP and specialists) in Norway based on data from the Surveys of Living Conditions for the years 2000, 2002 and 2005. Within this period the Norwegian public health care system underwent two major reforms, both aimed at ensuring...

In recent years, decentralization of financial and political power has been perceived as a useful means to improve outcomes of the health care sector. Such reforms are often a result of fashion, rather than being based on knowledge of “what works”. If decentralization is the favored strategy...

A frequent form of pay-for-performance programs increase reimbursement for all services by a certain percentage of the baseline price. We examine how such a “bonus-for-quality” reimbursement scheme affects the wage contract given to physicians by the hospital management. To this end, we...

This paper examines how changes in reimbursement fees influence the service production of laboratory tests among Norwegian primary care physicians. The data represent a panel of 2,083 physicians paid on a fee-for-service basis for the period 2001–04. We construct a variable that measures the...