This work carries out an empirical evaluation of the impact of the main mechanism for regulating the prices of medicines in the UK on a variety of pharmaceutical price indices. The empirical evidence shows that the overall impact of the rate of return cap appears to have been slight or even...

This paper discusses how a decision maker should deal with uncertainty, both in the sense of a well-known probability distribution of different outcomes and as a situation where also the probability distribution is unknown. A simple baseline model is used throughout the paper, where the decision...

This paper analyses the behaviour of pharmaceutical companies that face the threat of having their drugs excluded from reimbursement and the markets characterised also by price caps. We conclude that price elasticity of demand and cost differentials cause the price discounts which drug firms...

A health policy reform aiming to reduce hospital waiting times and sickness absences, the Faster Return to Work (FRW) scheme, is evaluated by creating treatment and control groups to facilitate causal interpretations of the empirical results. We use a unique dataset on individuals where we match...

In this paper, we study how public and private expenditures in health and education affect economic growth by their influence on peoples health, abilities, skills and knowledge. We consider a growth accounting framework in order to test whether welfare expenditures more than offset the...

This paper examines the determinants of very low birth weight infant (or neonatal) mortality using the Taiwan National Health Insurance Research database from 1997 to 2009. After infants are discharged from hospital, it is not possible to track their mortality, so the Cox proportional hazard...

Providing health insurance involves a trade-off between the benefits from risk spreading and the costs due to moral hazard. Focusing on pharmaceuticals consumption, this paper examines theoretically whether reference pricing, requiring individuals to pay the price difference if, in this case,...

Should governments allow parallel trade of pharmaceuticals? There is no clear-cut answer to this question, since parallel trade causes some public concerns. One is that prices might not decrease much in the home country because consumers are price insensitive as a result of medical insurance....

In this paper we investigate reporting heterogeneity in the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) when it is used to measure current health status in cardiovascular patients. We provide a new framework to identify reporting heterogeneity using quantile regressions. EQ-5D responses are used as a proxy to...

During the late nineteenth century the physical stature of New Zealandborn men stagnated, despite an apparently beneficial public health environment and growth in per-capita incomes. Stature varied by social class, with professionals and men in rural occupations substantially taller than their...