While a growing literature examining the relationship between income and health expenditures suggests that health care is a luxury good, this conclusion is contentiously debated due to heterogeneity of the existing results. This paper tests the luxury good hypothesis using meta-regression...

Western societies can reduce avoidable mortality and morbidity by better understanding the relationship between obesity and chronic disease. This paper examines the joint determinants of obesity and of heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, and elevated cholesterol. It analyzes a broadly...

A key question underpinning health production, and one that remains relatively unexplored, is the influence of socio-economic and environmental factors on weight gain and obesity. Such issues acquire particular relevance when data from two Mediterranean countries (Italy and Spain) are compared....

We study the competitive effects of restricting direct access to secondary care by gatekeeping, focusing on the informational role of gatekeeping general practitioners (GPs). We consider a secondary care market with two hospitals choosing the quality and specialisation of their care. GPs...

The right to equal treatment, irrespective of age, gender, ethnicity, socio-economic status and place of resident, is an important principle for several health care systems. A reform of the Norwegian hospital sector may be used as a relevant experiment for investigating whether centralization of...

This paper analyses the impact of economic conditions and access to primary health care on health outcomes in Norway. Total mortality rates, grouped into four causes of death, were used as proxies for health, and the number of general practitioners (GPs) at the municipality level was used as the...

Objective: Targeting hospital treatment at patients with high priority would seem to be a natural policy response to the growing gap between what can be done and what can be financed in the specialist health care sector. The paper examines the distributionalconsequences of this policy. Method:...

We analyze and compare inequity in use of physician visits (GP and specialists) in Norway based on data from the Surveys of Living Conditions for the years 2000, 2002 and 2005. Within this period the Norwegian public health care system underwent two major reforms, both aimed at ensuring...

In recent years, decentralization of financial and political power has been perceived as a useful means to improve outcomes of the health care sector. Such reforms are often a result of fashion, rather than being based on knowledge of “what works”. If decentralization is the favored strategy...

We present a model of optimal contracting between a purchaser and a provider of health services when quality has two dimensions. We assume that one dimension of quality is veri?able (dimension 1) and one dimension is not verifiable (dimension 2). We show that the power of the incentive scheme...