Does medical insurance affect health care demand and in the end contribute to improvements in the health status? Evidence for China for the year 2004, by means of the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), shows that health insurance does not affect health care demand in a significant manner....

We estimate the impact on health care utilization and out-of-pocket (OOP) expenditures of a major reform in Thailand that extended health insurance to one-quarter of the population to achieve universal coverage while keeping health spending below 4% of GDP. Identification is through comparison...

Health shocks are among the most important unprotected risks for microfinance clients, but the take-up of micro health insurance typically remains limited. This paper attributes low enrolment rates to a social dilemma. Our theory is that in jointly liable groups, insurance is a public good....

The Indonesian Healthcard program was implemented in response to the economiccrisis, which hit Indonesia in 1998, in order to preserve access to health care servicesfor the poor. The Healthcard provided the households with subsidised care at publichealth care providers, while the providers...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in <A href="http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10645-014-9244-6">'De Economist'</A>, 2015, 163, 25-60. This paper looks into the search behavior of consumers in the market for health insurance contracts. We consider the recent health insurance reform in The Netherlands, where a private-public mix of insurance...</a>

The introduction of the New Cooperative Medical Scheme in rural China is one of the largest health care reforms in the developing world since the millennium. The literature to date has mainly used the uneven rollout of NCMS across counties as a way of identifying its effects on access to care...

Limited liability may result in inefficient accident prevention, because a relevant portion of the expected harm is externalized on victims. This paper shows that under some restrictive conditions further limiting liability by means of a liability cap can improve caretaking.

Institutional barriers to entry were removed to a considerable extent in 1996 in the Dutch retail sector. Three years before that the regulator decided to not take legal actions anymore against entrants violating institutional requirements. In the current analysis we investigate the effects of...

We study antitrust enforcement that channels price-fixing incentives through setting fines and allocating resources to detection activities. Antitrust fines obey four legal principles: punishments should fit the crime, proportionality, bankruptcy considerations, and minimum fines. Bankruptcy...

We analyze maximal cartel prices in infinitely-repeated oligopoly models under leniency where fines are linked to illegal gains, as often outlined in existing antitrust regulation, and detection probabilities depend on the degree of collusion. We introduce cartel culture that describes how...