How does fiscal decentralisation affect the development of a health system? Evidence from health care decentralisation in Europe can offer some insights to the question above. This paper addresses the effects of health care decentralisation in Europe, and reviews some of the key questions on the...

This paper explores the changing role of government involvement in health care financing policy outside the United States. It provides a review of the economics literature in this area to elucidate the implications of recent policy changes on efficiency, costs, and quality. Our review reveals...

This paper investigates the effects of local smoking bans on different outcomes using county and time variation over the last 20 years in the US. First, I find no evidence that local smoking bans in bars, restaurants and workplaces decrease the prevalence of smoking. The estimates are very small...

A statistical problem that arises in several fields is that of estimating the features of an unknown distribution, which may be conditioned on covariates, using a sample of binomial observations on whether draws from this distribution exceed threshold levels set by experimental design....

Let r (x, z) be a function that, along with its derivatives, can be consistently estimated nonparametrically. This paper discusses identification and consistent estimation of the unknown functions H, M, G and F, where r (x, z) = H [M (x, z)] and M (x, z) = G(x) + F (z). An estimation algorithm...

We estimate semiparametric Engel curves for rural Pakistan using a large household survey. This allows us to obtain consistent estimates of the effects of household size and composition on consumption patterns even when these demographic variables are correlated with an unknown function of...

Assessing the value of new medical technologies may require new approaches that take into account a more comprehensive set of parameters than the incremental cost/QALY. It is argued that MCDA can fulfil this role and has the potential to be methodologically superior to the currently used...

This paper investigates the determinants of the prices of branded prescription medicines across different regulatory settings and health care systems, taking into account their launch date, patent status, market dynamics and the regulatory context in which they diffuse. By using volume-weighted...

The impacts of choice in public services are controversial. We exploit a reform in the English National Health Service to assess the impact of relaxing constraints on patient choice. We estimate a demand model to evaluate whether increased choice increased demand elasticity faced by hospitals...