Abstract: Using a newly constructed dataset on German hospitals, which includes 24 process and outcome indicators of clinical quality, we test whether quality has increased in various clinical areas since the introduction of mandatory quality reports and the online publication of part of the...

Abstract: 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...

We study optimal risk adjustment in imperfectly competitive health insurance markets when high-risk consumers are less likely to switch insurer than low-risk consumers. First, we find that insurers still have an incentive to select even if risk adjustment perfectly corrects for cost differences...

Abstract: In this paper, I examine the impact of uninsured patients on the health of the insured, focusing on one health outcome - the in-hospital mortality rate of insured heart attack patients. I employ panel data models using patient discharge and hospital financial data from California...

Abstract: We examine the impact of new medical information on drug safety on preventive health behavior. We exploit the release of the findings of the Women's Health Initiative Study (WHIS) -the largest randomized controlled trial of women's health- which demonstrated in 2002 that long-term...

This paper compares the welfare effects of three ways in which health care can be organized: no competition (NC), competition for the market (CfM) and competition on the market (CoM) where the payer offers the optimal contract to providers in each case. We argue that each of these can be optimal...

In a model where patients face budget constraints that make some treatments unaffordable, we ask which treatments should be covered by universal basic insurance and which by private voluntary insurance. We argue that both cost effectiveness and prevalence are important if the government wants to...

This paper introduces a tractable model of health insurance with both moral hazard<br/>and adverse selection. We show that government sponsored universal basic insurance should cover treatments with the biggest adverse selection problems. Treatments not covered by basic insurance can be covered on...

In this paper we examine the impact of information on individual contributions in a public-bad experiment. We compare two experimental treatments. In the partial information treatment, subjects are only informed about the total contributions by their group, whereas in the full information...

Limit core allocations are the ones that remain in the core of a replicated economy.An equivalent notion for economies with public goods is Schweizer s concept of club e ciency under a variable number of economic agents.We extend this notion to economies with goods that have a semi-public...