This paper investigates the consequences that patients face when their regular primary care provider closes down her practice, typically due to retirement. We estimate the causal impact of closures on patients' utilization patterns, medical expenditures, hospitalizations, and health plan choice....

Survival rates are widely used to compare quality of health care. In this paper we introduce post-illness employment as a supplemental indicator of successful treatment of serious diseases. Utilizing rich register based data on cancer patients we document substantial differences across Norwegian...

Today a new generation of food safety policy is emerging in OECD countries and international public health forums. The United States has actively contributed to the thinking and scientific research underlying this new generation of policy. A consensus has emerged among nations about the basic...

We propose an innovative child-specific measure of son preference. It allows to explicitly address birth order and sex composition effects. We first establish that, when using this child-specific measure, son preference is more common among later born children and in families with fewer sons. We...

Women's empowerment is increasingly put forth as a mean to promote child development. However, little empirical research has evaluated the pathways of women empowerment leading to it. This paper uses a household survey conducted in Karnataka, South India to explore the impact of female status on...

The lottery of birth draws some children into deprived environments and others into environments where they thrive. In a field experiment in rural India with 10-20 months old children we test two scalable interventions to reduce early disadvantages in health and mental development. We distribute...

On the basis of the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement (SHARE), we analyse the determinants of who engages in mammography screening focusing on European women aged 50-69 years. A special emphasis is put on the measurement error of subjective life expectancy and on the measurement and...

In many healthcare markets, physicians can influence the volume (volume response) and the composition of the services provided (substitution response). The goal and main contribution of this paper is to empirically assess the relative importance of these two behavioral channels. Our analysis is...

Healthcare providers’ response to payment incentives may have consequences for both fiscal spending and patient health. This paper studies the effects of a change in the payment scheme for hospitals in Norway. In 2010, payments for patients discharged on the day of admission were substantially...

Health care markets often lack a market force because the presence of health insurance undermines price signals. Patients have little incentive to shop for low-priced alternatives because they do not bear the full cost of their health care consumption. In turn, producers lack incentives to...