Several studies have documented that employer incentives, in form of experience rating, co-insurance or deductibles, could decrease the social insurance usage. Such employer incentives may though have unintended side effects, as it gives employers incentives to transfer the costs to their...

The COVID-19 pandemic had disastrous effects on health and economic activity worldwide, including in the Euro Area. The application of mandatory lockdowns contributed to a sharp fall in production and a rise in unemployment, inducing an expansionary fiscal and monetary response. Using a uniquely...

The article analyzes to which extent residential proximity from an emergency hospital affects the probability of surviving an acute myocardial infarction (AMI). The critical time aspect in AMI treatment provides an ideal application for evaluating this proximity-outcome hypothesis. Previous...

Several European countries have followed the United States in introducing prospective payment for hospitals with the expectation of achieving cost efficiency gains. This article examines whether theoretical expectations of cost efficiency gains can be empirically confirmed. In contrast to...

The determinants of the dramatically rising expenditures on health care in general, and on hospital care in particular, have been of prior concern to policy and to research. Using a rich panel data set this paper contributes to this literature by investigating factors determining the demand for...

With many countries considering the adoption of a system of earned income tax credits, it is useful to analyze how different types of credits affect labor supply and earnings. This paper focuses on a 1999 reform to the UK tax credit system, which increased the value of the credit and reduced the...

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...

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 paper proposes an explanation of the puzzling coexistence of elements of inertia and dynamism on the Russian labour market using a segmentation model. Risk averse workers are differentiated according to their productivity. They face a trade-off between wages and access to social services...

This article uses recent survey data from the Kayes area (Western Mali) to estimate the effect of migration and remittances on the technical efficiency of agricultural households. A theoretical model is developed, which shows that the more insurance is provided by the migrants, the less...