This article analyzes the effect of public policy intervention in the production of health capital on fertility, private investment in children's health and education and human capital accumulation. I have used a growth model with endogenous fertility, in which the usual parental trade-off...

Health care financing and funding are usually analyzed in isolation. This paper combines the corresponding strands of the literature and thereby advances our understanding of the important interaction between them. We investigate the impact of three modes of health care financing, namely,...

Does regional decentralization threaten the commitment to regional equality in government outcomes? We attempt to shed light on this question by drawing on unique evidence from the largest European unitary states to have engaged in countrywide health system decentralization: Italy and Spain. We...

This paper discusses the relationship between medical innovations and ageing from a health economics perspective and surveys empirical evidence on medical R&D incentives, R&D costs of pharmaceuticals, and the cost-effectiveness of health innovations. Particular focus is on the endogeneity of...

We embed a lockdown choice in a simplified epidemiological model and derive formulas for the optimal lockdown intensity and duration. The optimal policy reflects the rate of time preference, epidemiological factors, the hazard rate of vaccine discovery, learning effects in the health care...

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between globalization, Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases, and associated deaths in more than 100 countries. Our ordinary least squares multivariate regressions show that countries with higher levels of socio-economic globalization...

Early non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) significantly reduced the death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, there are vast differences in how quickly governments implemented NPIs. In this paper, we analyze the role of public attention, measured as the share of daily Google searches in a...

Uniform health care delivered by a mainstream public insurer - such as the National Health Service (NHS), seldom satisfies heterogeneous demands for care, and some unsatisfied share of the population either use private health care, or purchase private insurance (PHI). One potential mechanism to...

We study the competitive effects of restricting direct access to secondary care by gatekeeping, focusing on the informational role of general practitioners (GPs). In the secondary care market there are two hospitals choosing quality and specialisation. Patients, who are ex ante uninformed, can...