Medical technological progress has been shown to be the main driver of health care costs. A key policy question is whether new treatment options are worth the additional costs. In this paper we assess the causal effect of percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA), a major new heart...

Long waiting lines are a common feature and a major concern in many public health care delivery systems. The waiting lines are often characterized as inefficient, because they are a burden to patients without generating any gains for providers. There is an ongoing debate in Germany regarding the...

Using a randomized field experiment, we show that health care specialists cream-skim patients by their expected profitability. In the German two-tier system, outpatient reimbursement rates for both public and private insurance are centrally determined but are more than twice as high for the...

Healthcare utilization varies widely between regions. Yet, the causes of regional variation are still not well understood, and they can also differ between countries and institutional settings. We exploit patient migration to examine which share of regional variation in ambulatory care use in...

Does higher medical spending improve quality of care? We estimate the effect of changes in regulated reimbursement prices for hospitals on multiple dimensions of hospital quality, including mortality outcomes, surgical complications, process quality, and patient satisfaction. We exploit an...

This paper analyses the volume-outcome relationship and the effects of minimum volume regulations in the German hospital sector. We use a full sample of administrative data from the unselected, complete German hospital population for the years 2005 to 2007. We apply regression methods to analyze...