In this paper we concentrate on the question whether the financing structure of the health care systems converges. In a world of increasing economic integration convergence in health care financing (HCF) and, hence, decreasing differences in HCF across countries enhance individuals' (labour)...

Firm turnover has recently attracted increased interest in economic research. The entry of new firms increases competition and promises efficiency gains. Moreover, changes in the market structure influence productivity growth, because firm entry usually leads to increased innovation. The health...

This paper studies the interaction between public and private health care provision in a National Health Service (NHS), with free public care and costly private care. The health authority decides whether or not to allow private provision and sets the public sector remuneration. The physicians...

The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) has been at the epicenter of public discussions due to its possibly adverse effects on the domestic regulation of public services. While the GATS has an admittedly broad scope, its ‘bite’ largely depends on commitments undertaken by WTO...

This paper studies how gifts - monetary or in-kind payments - from drug firms to physicians in the US affect prescriptions and drug costs. We estimate heterogeneous treatment effects by combining physician-level data on antidiabetic prescriptions and payments with causal inference and machine...

We estimate and decompose family income-related inequality in child health in the US and analyze its dynamics using the income-related health mobility index recently introduced by Allanson et al., 2010. Data come from the 1997, 2002, and 2007 waves of the Child Development Supplement (CDS) of...

We analyze health care option demand markets with vertical restraints divided along two dimensions: naked and conditional exclusion, and vertical integration; applicable to the upstream, the downstream, and both markets. Our unified framework includes forward and backward integration, and joint...

This paper investigates the impact of monitoring institutions on market outcomes in health care. Health care markets are characterized by asymmetric information. Physicians have an information advantage over patients with respect to the appropriate treatment for the patient and may exploit this...

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...

As the healthcare sector grows in significance due to social and technical developments the EU competition rules are likely to be more frequently applied to healthcare both as a result of the broad interpretation of the concept of undertaking and because the applicable antitrust rules are since...