Due to regional competition and patient migration, the efficiency of healthcare provision at the regional level is subject to spatial dependence. We address this issue by applying a spatial autoregressive model to longitudinal data from Germany at the district (‘Kreis’) level. The empirical...

In 2001 Germany introduced disease management programmes (DMPs) in order to give sick funds an incentive to improve the treatment of the chronically ill. By 1 March 2005, a total of 3275 programmes had been approved, 2760 for diabetes, 390 for breast cancer and 125 for coronary heart disease,...

According to a classical result, a move from uniform pricing to third-degree price discrimination only improves welfare if total output increases. In this paper I show that the classical result fails in the presence of subsidies. This finding appears to be relevant for the pharmaceutical sector...

In the wake of the USA's refusal to ratify the Kyoto agreement on curbing greenhouse gas emissions, this article pledges for a national energy policy beyond Kyoto, based on local external effects stemming from the combustion of fossil fuels. Due to varying external effects a national policy will...

Over the past 50 years Germans have spent a rising share of their income on health and enjoyed substantially longer lives as a result. The rising health share can be explained by a standard economic model: As people get richer they purchase additional years of life and less additional...

We explore the hierarchy of two instruments, waiting time and coinsurance for medical treatment, for optimally solving the tradeoff between the economic gains from risk sharing and the losses from moral hazard. We show that the optimal waiting time is zero, given that the coinsurance rate is...

Salas and Raftery allege that in our paper, (1) remaining life expectancy is an endogenous explanatory variable of health care expenditure and (2) the parameter designed to correct for sample selection bias in fact represents a hidden relationship between health care expenditure and age. We...

The observation that average health care expenditure rises with age generally leads experts and laymen alike to conclude that population ageing is the main driver of health care costs. In recently published studies we challenged this view (Zweifel et al., 1999; Felder et al., 2000). Analysing health...