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 investigates the effects of health-care spending on mortality rates of heart attack patients. We relate in-hospital deaths to in-hospital end-oflife spending and post-discharge deaths to post-discharge health-care spending. In our analysis, we use detailed administrative data on...

We investigate the presence of moral hazard and advantageous or adverse selection in a market for supplementary health insurance. For this we specify and estimate dynamic models for health insurance decisions and health care utilization. Estimates of the health care utilization models indicate...

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...

This paper looks into the search behavior of consumers in the market for health insurance contracts. We consider the recent health insurance reform in The Netherlands, where a private-public mix of insurance provision was replaced by a system based on managed competition. Although all insurers...

Has massive distribution of insecticide-treated-nets contributed to the reduction in in- fant mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa over the past 15 years? Using large household surveys collected in 16 countries and exploiting the spatial correlation in distribution campaigns, we estimate the...

Workers with fixed-term contracts typically have worse health than workers with permanent contracts. We show that these differences in health translate into a substantially higher (30%) risk of applying for disability insurance (DI) in the Netherlands. Using unique administrative data on health...

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...