People in Canada and the U.S. often make claims regarding whose country has a better health system. Several researchers have attempted to address this question by analysing subjective health in the two countries, thus assuming a common definition of “good” health. Using data from the Joint...

Cost sharing represents a well-established tool for the control of health care demand in many Oecd countries. However, it is used with caution and in combination with other instruments in order to avoid potential negative impacts on access to essential health care services. Waiting lists and...

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...

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...

In this paper, we test whether promoting digital government tools increases the take-up of an important public health prevention service: cervical cancer screening. We implemented an at-scale field experiment in Uruguay, randomly encouraging women to make medical appointments with a digital...

Medical tourism is a term to describe the rapidly-growing practice of traveling across international borders to obtain health care. Services typically sought by travelers include elective procedures as well as complex specialized surgeries. Over 50 countries have identified medical tourism as a...

Maintaining high standards of care from doctors, nurses and other health professionals is of critical importance for an effective and efficient health system. Yet deficient levels of health worker performance, including low effort, absenteeism, and lack of compliance with clinical guidelines,...

Malaria kills about 1,500 children every day. Based on the Demographic and Health Surveys, we examine malaria treatment practices of various health care providers in sub-Saharan Africa, where more than 90 percent of the world’s deaths due to malaria occur. To assess the quality of each health...

The present paper outlines measures of disparity in healthcare access and health outcomes, drawing from the standardized metrics introduced in one related study (Bancalari et al., 2023). Beveridge countries seem to be less unequal than Bismarckian countries. Yet, there is no strong pattern in...

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%,...