There is renewed interest in why people of lower socio-economic status (SES) have worse health outcomes. No matter which measures of SES are used (income, wealth, or education), the evidence that this association is large is abundant (Marmot (1999), Smith (1999)). The relation between SES and...

A common approach to avoid risk selection in health insurance markets is to define and enforce a community-rated basic benefit package. The market for complementary insurance is usually completely separate from the market for basic health insurance. In Switzerland, however, the basic benefit...

In the absence of a perfect risk adjustment scheme, reimbursing health insurers' costs can reduce risk selection in community-rated health insurance markets. In this paper, we develop a model in which insurers determine the cost efficiency of health care and have incentives for risk selection....

Individual moral hazard engendered by health insurance and monopolistic production are both typical phenomena of drug markets. We develop a simple model containing these two elements and evaluate the market equilibrium on the basis of consumer and social welfare. The consumer welfare criterion...

There is a growing interest in cross-border medical care and its comparative advantages. In addition, medical care can be defined as a local assurance good. Little research is being carried out in this field. This paper discusses the individual considerations for medical treatment offered at...

The paper examines whether a worker's sick absence behaviour influences the risk of becoming unemployed. Swedish panel data are used to estimate the relationship between the incidence and duration of sick leave and subsequent unemployment. The results indicate that an increase in the number of...

This paper examines the incentive effects caused by the interactions between unemployment insurance (UI) and sickness insurance (SI), two important components of Sweden's social insurance system. There are two main topics of interest: how the sickness report rate and the length of the subsequent...

One of the main features of health insurance is moral hazard, as defined by Pauly (1968); people face incentives for excess utilization of medical care since they do not pay the full marginal cost for provision. To mitigate the moral hazard problem, a coinsurance can be included in the insurance...