UK Local Authorities purchase care home places on behalf of a large group of people following a means test of their income and wealth. All other buyers of care home services are atomistic. The care home market is characterised by a large number of small providers. Local authorities may thus have...

About one in ten patients are harmed during health care. This paper estimates the health, financial and economic costs of this harm. Results indicate that patient harm exerts a considerable global health burden. The financial cost on health systems is also considerable and if the flow-on...

We assess the productivity growth of the English and Italian healthcare systems over the period from 2004 to 2011. The English (NHS) and the Italian (SSN) healthcare systems share many similar features, facilitating comparison: basic founding principles, financing, organization, management, and...

Universal health coverage has been achieved in nearly all OECD countries, providing the population with access to a defined range of goods and services. This paper provides detailed descriptions of how countries delineate the range of benefits covered, including the role of health technology...

The aim of this article is to analyze the relationship between drug price and drug quality and how it varies across two of the most common regulatory regimes in the pharmaceutical market: Minimum Efficacy Standards (MES) and Price Controls (PC). We develop a model of adverse selection where a...

Physical inactivity and sedentary behaviours have been rising throughout the OECD in recent decades. Lack of physical activity and excessive sedentary behaviour are well-known risk factors for non-communicable diseases, such as heart diseases, stroke, diabetes, and osteoporosis. As such,...

This paper investigates the potential of an infant intervention to improve life expectancy, contributing to emerging interest in the early life origins of chronic disease. We analyse a pioneering program trialled in Sweden in the 1930s, which provided information, support and monitoring of...

This study covers “tapering scale” mechanism in hospital payments, i.e. mechanisms linking unit prices to the volume of services produced. This paper begins with an overview of hospital services and hospital payment methods in OECD countries, focusing more specifically on DRG-based payment....

This paper investigates the impact of the public smoking ban which came into effect in Italy on January 2005 on individual smoking behaviour. Current empirical evidence supports the existence of a negative effect of the Italian ban on smoking prevalence and consumption in the general population....

This paper investigates the effect of price variations on the diet composition in Britain. It describes the dynamics of food demand in relation to food prices over time using data from the British National Food Survey (NFS) covering the period 1975-2000. Demand elasticities with respect to price...