This paper investigates the potential of maternal and infant health programs to improve the life expectancy of women and children. We study a program trialed 1931-33 in seven Swedish medical districts, assembling individual data from parish records and aggregate data from annual reports of...

Many health care systems aim to enhance hospital quality by encouraging competition. However, evidence on the relationship between quality and competition is inconclusive. My contribution to this literature is two-fold. Analyzing the relationship between competition and quality for the German...

This paper examines the effects of hospital case volume on quality of care on the example of intact abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) and hip fracture (HIP). We conduct the analysis on patient level with multiple logistic regression analysis. Quality is measured with a binary variable which...

Competing hospitals may not only use quality of service to attract patients but also their specialization profile. Applying a Hotelling-duopoly and interpreting respectively quality and specialization as vertical and horizontal differentiation, we analyze the optimal allocation in both...

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...

New empirical evidence shows substantial heterogeneity in the altruism of healthcare providers. Spurred by this evidence, we build a spatial quality competition model with altruism heterogeneity. We find that more altruistic healthcare providers supply relatively higher quality levels and...

This paper examines the causal effect of the experience of a hospital with treating hip fractures (volume) on treatment outcome for patients. A full sample of administrative data from Germany for the year 2007 is used. We apply an instrumental variable approach to eliminate endogeneity concerns...

This paper investigates the relationship between health outcomes and variations in staffing levels as approximated by admissions on weekdays versus admissions on weekends. Because days of admission are potentially endogenous, we instrument on emergency admissions only, which are reasonably...

Theoretically, there are several reasons to expect education to have a positive effect on health, and empirical research suggests that education can be an important health determinant. However, it has not yet been established whether education and health are indeed causally-related, and the...

The strong association between income and mortality raises the question whether more generous social security systems could improve poor people’s health outcomes. Thus, in this paper, I analyze whether a major social security innovation, the introduction of social pensions targeted at poor...