In the first two quarters of 2013 the Georgian government introduced and fully implemented a universal health care (UHC) plan covering all those not-yet publicly or privately insured. We estimate the effect of the introduction of the universal healthcare plan on the level of out-of-pocket (OOP)...

This paper investigates the returns to health care provision during the mortality transition. We construct a new panel data set covering German municipalities from 1928 to 1936. The endogeneity of health care supply is addressed by using the expulsion of Jewish physicians from statutory health...

Large regional disparities in health and healthcare costs prevail in many countries, but our understanding of the underlying causes is still limited. This study shows for the case of the Netherlands that population sorting through internal migration can explain a substantial share, around 28%,...

Travel restrictions are often imposed to limit the spread of infectious diseases. As uniform restrictions can be inefficient and incur unnecessarily high costs, this paper examines the optimal design of restrictions that target specific travel routes. We propose a model with trade-offs between...

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged the capacity of healthcare systems around the world and can potentially compromise healthcare utilization and health outcomes among non-COVID-19 patients. Using monthly panel data of nationally representative middle-aged and older Singaporeans, we examined...

In response to the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), there have been substantial variations in policy response and performance for disease control and prevention within and across nations. It remains unclear to what extent these variations may be explained by bureaucrats'...

We investigate universalization of access to health in Brazil. We find large reductions in maternal, foetal, neonatal and post-neonatal mortality, a reduction in fertility and, possibly on account of selection, no change in the quality of births. Using rich administrative data, we investigate...

This study explores whether hospitals with higher increases in obesity levels have higher CS rates and the consequential effects on maternal and newborn health in Mexico for 2008-2015. It models how changes in the obesity level of hospitals' patient pools may affect the quantity and quality of...

This paper reviews the history of the practice of quarantines, rediscovering the 19th century 'Sanitarian' movement in Britain that sprang from a recognition that quarantines had failed to stop the spread of diseases and were not cost-effective. To our knowledge, the key figure among the...

We propose a novel framework to analyse the macroeconomic impact of non-communicable diseases. We incorporate measures of disease prevalence into a human capital augmented production function, which enables us to determine the economic costs of chronic health conditions in terms of foregone...