Does medical insurance affect health care demand and in the end contribute to improvements in the health status? Evidence for China for the year 2004, by means of the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), shows that health insurance does not affect health care demand in a significant manner....

Physicians are supposed to serve patients' interests, but some are more inclined to do so than others. This paper studies how the system of health care provision affects the allocation of patients to physicians when physicians differ in altruism. We show that allowing for private provision of...

This paper studies an identification problem that arises when clinicians seek to personalize patient care by predicting health outcomes conditional on observed patient covariates. Let y be an outcome of interest and let (x=k, w=j) be observed patient covariates. Suppose a clinician wants to...

This paper proposes a method to estimate price sensitivity of economic agents exploiting discontinuity in nonlinear contracts. As an application, we study contracts between a managed care organization and hospitals for organ transplants. Exploiting donut holes in the reimbursement contracts, we...

Using a large set of private health insurance claims, we estimate how physicians’ financial incentives affect their treatment choices in heart attack management. Different insurance plans pay physicians different amounts for the same services, generating the required variation in financial...

One of the reasons why regulators are hesitant about permitting price competition in healthcare markets is that it may damage quality when information is poor. Evidence on whether this fear is well-founded is scarce. We provide evidence using a reform that permitted Dutch health insurers and...

We examine the effect of publicly provided health care on welfare by combining local level data on public health care, and individual level data on life satisfaction. It is shown that relatively high expenditures in health care have a positive effect on individuals' life satisfaction in our...