This paper evaluates the short- and medium-term health impacts of offering families with children under 5 universal access to centres providing childcare, health services, parenting support and parental job assistance. Increased access to these centres during early childhood increases the...

This paper investigates the potential of new technologies to reduce disparities in the provision of healthcare services. Differences in providers’ skills may cause variation in patient outcomes. The adoption of innovations, like robots, can attenuate this problem if technological gains are...

There is widespread and unexplained variation in the outcomes of similar patients across place and providers in all developed health systems. This paper provides new evidence on the role senior doctors play in determining patient outcomes. I exploit within-hospital quasi-random assignment of...

We analyse - theoretically and empirically - the effect of hospital mergers on waiting times in healthcare markets where prices are fixed. Using a spatial modelling framework where patients choose provider based on travelling distance and waiting times, we show that the effect is theoretically...

Early Childhood Interventions (ECI) offering disadvantaged children preschool and family support services in the US show long-lasting health impacts. Can these benefits hold when these programs are offered to all children in contexts with universal healthcare? We evaluate the short- and...

Health economists have studied the determinants of the expected value of health status as a function of medical and nonmedical inputs, often finding small marginal effects of the former. This paper argues that both types of input have an additional benefit, viz. a reduced variability of health...

This study seeks to provide evidence for deciding whether or not a pharmaceutical innovation should be included in the benefit list of social health insurance. A discrete choice experiment (DCE) was conducted in Germany to measure preferences for modern insulin therapy. Of the 1,100 individuals...

In this paper, we address the issue of spurious correlation in the production of health in a systematic way. Spurious correlation entails the risk of linking health status to medical (and nonmedical) inputs when no links exist. This note first presents the bounds testing procedure as a method to...

This contribution contains an international comparison of preferences. Using two Discrete Choice Experiments (DCE), it measures willingness to pay for health insurance attributes in Germany and the Netherlands. Since the Dutch DCE was carried out right after the 2006 health reform, which made...