Hospital heterogeneity is a major issue in defining a reimbursement system. If hospitals are heterogeneous, it is difficult to distinguish which part of the differences in costs is due to cost containment efforts and which part cannot be reduced, because it is due to other unobserved sources of...

This paper studies the relationship between the diffusion of innovative procedures for the treatment of heart attack and distributions of the cost and length of hospital stays. Using a sample of 5,681 stays observed in French public hospitals, we use microsimulation techniques to highlight...

In many areas of health care financing, there is controversy over the sources of cost variability and about the respective roles of inefficiency versus legitimate heterogeneity. This paper proposes a payment system that creates incentives to increase hospital efficiency when hospitals are...

This article focusses on self-assessed unmet needs for financial reasons. We study its social and economic determinants and its consequences on future health status, from a longitu- dinal dataset: the French Heath, Health care and Insurance Survey (Enquête Santé Protection Sociale). We first...

In this paper, we analyse self-assessed unmet needs (SUN) for financial reasons and then study their consequences on health status four years later using ESPS data, a French general population survey on health, health care and insurance. Financial hurdles in accessing care as assessed by SUN are...

This paper uses data from recent Senegalese Demographic and Health Surveys to explore the link between female empowerment and child mortality via early marriage, defined as marriage before age 16. There exist three channels through which early marriage reduces a mother's ability to take good...

This paper aims to quantify and compare inequalities of opportunity in health across European countries considering two alternative normative ways of treating the correlation between effort, as measured by lifestyles, and circumstances, as measured by parental and childhood characteristics,...

Whereas health equity issues are undoubtedly more relevant in developing countries, research on health inequalities and, more specifically, on inequality of opportunity in the health dimension, remains scarce in this context. This paper explores the degree of inequality of opportunity in health...