Researchers often rely on household survey data to investigate health disparities and the incidence and prevalence of illness. These self-reported health measures are often biased due to information asymmetry or differences in reference groups. Using the World Health Organization study on global...

We evaluate the effectiveness of a post-conflict development programme on maternal health-care utilization in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. Our work varies from conventional impact evaluation studies because of the inclusion of two post-conflict psychosocial risks: the household's...

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...

How has government healthcare spending prepared countries for tackling the COVID19 pandemic? Arguably, spending is the primary policy tool of governments in providing effective health. We argue that the effectiveness of spending in reducing COVID deaths is conditional on the existence of...

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...

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...

The social determinants of health have not been studied extensively in low-income contexts, where most studies focus on access to medical care. We undertake a retrospective cross-sectional analysis of the social determinants of health in Mozambique for the 2002-14 period, covering 258,431...

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...