Does medical insurance affect health care demand and in the end contribute to improvements in the health status? Evidence for China for the year 2004, by means of the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), shows that health insurance does not affect health care demand in a significant manner....

Physicians are supposed to serve patients' interests, but some are more inclined to do so than others. This paper studies how the system of health care provision affects the allocation of patients to physicians when physicians differ in altruism. We show that allowing for private provision of...

When public long-term care (LTC) insurance is provided by insurers, they typically lack incentives for purchasing cost-effective LTC. Providing insurers with appropriate incentives for efficiency without jeopardizing access for high-risk individuals requires, among other things, an adequate...

This paper investigates the effects of health-care spending on mortality rates of heart attack patients. We relate in-hospital deaths to in-hospital end-of-life spending and post-discharge deaths to post-discharge health-care spending. In our analysis, we use detailed administrative data on...

Does medical insurance affect health care demand and in the end contribute to improvements in the health status? Evidence for China for the year 2004, by means of the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), shows that health insurance does not affect health care demand in a significant manner....

Physicians are supposed to serve patients' interests, but some are more inclined to do so than others. This paper studies how the system of health care provision affects the allocation of patients to physicians when physicians differ in altruism. We show that allowing for private provision of...

Pesticide use in agriculture poses several risks to both human health and non-target agro-ecosystems. Due to lack of information on the monetary value of reducing pesticide risks, it is difficult to perform an economic analysis that addresses social efficiency of policy and draws conclusions...

The widespread use of pesticides in agriculture provides a particularly complex pattern of multidimensionalnegative side-effects, ranging from food safety related effects to the deterioratian of farmland ecosystems.The assessment of the economic implications of such negative processes is fraught...

This paper provides an overview of the work of Gigerenzer, thereby focusing on his criticisms of the Heuristics and Biases theory of Kahneman and Tversky. It is proposed that Gigerenzer's work can be both thematically and chronologically organized as: historical research on statistics =...

Decisions-makers often rely on information supplied by interested parties. In practice, some parties have easier access to information than other parties. In this light, we examine whether more powerful parties have a disproportionate influence on decisions. We show that more powerful parties...