We develop a novel approach integrating epidemiological and economic models that allows databased simulations during a pandemic. We examine the economically optimal opening strategy that can be reconciled with the containment of a pandemic. The empirical evidence is based on data from Germany...

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 consider an economy where most of the health care is publicly provided,and where there is waiting time for several types of treatments. Privatehealth care without waiting time is an option for the patients in the publichealth queue. We show that although patients with low waiting costs...

Since 2003 German hospitals are reimbursed according to diagnosis related groups (DRGs). Patient classification in neonatology is based inter alia on birth weight, with substantial discontinuities in reimbursement at eight different thresholds. These discontinuities create strong incentives to...

Patient mobility is a key issue in the EU who recently passed a new law on patients' right to EU-wide provider choice. In this paper we use a Hotelling model with two regions that differ in technology to study the impact of patient mobility on health care quality, health care financing and...

We exploit variation across Italian Regions in the implementation of region-specific tariffs within a Prospective Pay System (PPS) for hospitals based on Diagnosis Related Groups (DRG) to assess their impact on health and on the use of health care services. We consider survey data for the years...

The Coordination Reform was introduced in Norway in 2012 including a fee for bed-blocking in hospitals. To study this, we introduce a Stackelberg game where the hospital is the leader and the care institution is the follower. The reform does not necessarily lead to less bed-blocking as this...

Policy makers use reference pricing to curb pharmaceutical expenditures by reducing coverage of expensive branded drugs. In a theoretical analysis we show that the net effect of reference pricing is generally ambiguous when accounting for entry by generic producers. Reference pricing shifts...

Theoretical considerations suggest that nonlinear health care price schedules have heterogeneous effects on health care demand. In this paper, we develop and apply a finite mixture bivariate probit model to analyze whether there are heterogeneous reactions to the introduction of a nonlinear...

This paper estimates a theory-guided gravity equation of regional patient flows. In our model, a patient’s choice to consult a physician in a particular region depends on a measure of spatial accessibility that accounts for the exact locations of both patients and physicians. Introducing this...