The discussion about health care systems focuses on the dynamics of expenditures and on the weak growth of the revenue base. In this discussion it is widely overseen that medical expenditures and supply of medical services crucially depend on the compensation of physician services. The paper...

The discussion about health care systems focuses on the dynamics of expenditures and on the weak growth of the revenue base. In this discussion it is widely overseen that medical expenditures and supply of medical services crucially depend on the compensation of physician services. The paper...

The importance of the physician-patient relationship for the health care market is beyond controversy. Recent work emphasizes a two-sided asymmetric information relationship between physician and patient. In contrast to most work looking only at the physician's perspective, our paper...

The economic costs of chronic health conditions and severe illnesses like diabetes, coronary heart disease or cancer are immense. Several clinical trials give information about the importance of individual behaviour for the prevalence of these illnesses. Changes in health relevant behaviour may...

The ambulatory physician payment system in the German Social Health Insurance (SHI) offers incentives to reduce practice activity at the end of a billing period. Most services within a period are reimbursed at full cost only up to a certain threshold. Furthermore, capitated payments make...

This paper explores the effects of insurance parameters and complementary information environment on the patient's primary prevention activity. The theoretical model is based on a principal-agent setting in which the patient acts as an agent in deciding about his prevention efforts. The insurer...

Estimation procedures for ordered categories usually assume that the estimated coefficients of independent variables do not vary between the categories (parallel-lines assumption). This view neglects possible heterogeneous effects of some explaining factors. This paper describes the use of an...

The goal of this study is to provide empirical evidence of the impact of nurse staffing levels on seven nursing-sensitive patient outcomes (NSPOs) at the hospital unit level. Combining a very large set of claims data from a German health insurer with mandatory quality reports published by every...

This paper examines the behaviour of mental health care providers in response to marginal payment incentives induced by a discontinuous per diem reimbursement schedule with varying tariff rates over the length of stay. The analyses use administrative data on 12,627 cases treated in 82...