The aims of this study were (1) to analyse whether informal care, provided by children or grandchildren to their elderly parents, and formal care are substitutes or complements, and (2) whether this relationship differs across Europe. The analyses were based on the newly developed SHARE (Survey...

This paper estimates the health returns to education, using data on identical twins. I adopt a twin-differences strategy in order to obtain estimates that are not biased by unobserved family background and genetic traits that may affect both education and health. I further investigate to what...

We investigate the impact on work absence of a massive reduction in paid sick leave benefits. We exploit a policy change that only affected public sector workers in Spain and compare changes in the number and length of spells they take relative to unaffected private sector workers. Our results...

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...

Elderly home-owners get institutionalized less often than renters do. We hypothesize that housing tenure itself explains this behavior. Using longitudinal data from a Dutch community sample (N= 2,372) collected between 1992 and 2005, we find a negative effect of housing tenure on the probability...

We investigate the presence of moral hazard and advantageous or adverse selection in a market for supplementary health insurance. For this we specify and estimate dynamic models for health insurance decisions and health care utilization. Estimates of the health care utilization models indicate...

This paper looks into the search behavior of consumers in the market for health insurance contracts. We consider the recent health insurance reform in The Netherlands, where a private-public mix of insurance provision was replaced by a system based on managed competition. Although all insurers...

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...

One of the reasons why regulators are hesitant about permitting price competition in healthcare markets is that it may damage quality when information is poor. Evidence on whether this fear is well-founded is scarce. We provide evidence using a reform that permitted Dutch health insurers and...