We study the impact of product margins on pharmacies' incentive to promote generics instead of brand-names. First, we construct a theoretical model where pharmacies can persuade patients with a brand-name prescription to purchase a generic version instead. We show that pharmacies' substitution...

Competition among physicians is widespread, but compelling empirical evidence on the impact on service provision is limited, mainly due to lack of exogenous variation in the degree of competition. In this paper we exploit that many GPs, in addition to own practice, work in local emergency...

In Scandinavia, the provision of health care services has been, almost entirely, the responsibility of the public health care system. However, in the last five to seven years there has been remarkable growth in the private health care market. These health care services are obtained normally...

We study the impact of regulation on competition between brand-names and generics and pharmaceutical expenditures using a unique policy experiment in Norway, where reference pricing (RP) replaced price cap regulation in 2003 for a sub-sample of off-patent products. First, we construct a vertical...

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...

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...

This study examines the impact of competition on hospital quality. Our panel covers all Dutch hospitals in the period 2004–2008, in which the transparency of hospital quality information increased substantially. The paper contributes to the existing literature by including both outcome and...

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...

Whereas the EU's internal market rules govern market access and public intervention, its competition rules are concerned with the market conduct of private parties. When do the competition rules apply to healthcare? In principle the scope for application of the competition rules to the...