This paper examines weight loss and the formation of healthy habits through cash rewards in the context of a multi-phase randomized controlled trial involving 700 obese individuals. We find effects of monetary incentives for weight loss of up to EUR 300 on body weight during all experimental...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

This paper analyzes the effect of educational mismatch on wages in Germany, using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. Educational mismatch has been discussed extensively, mostly by applying OLS wage regressions which are prone to an unobserved heterogeneity bias. This problem is...

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%,...

We study the regional distribution of primary care physicians in Germany to learn about the extent and possible reasons of geographic maldistribution. For this aim, we apply a greedy capacitated algorithm on very fine spatial data. We compare this reference allocation of primary care physicians...