Informal payments for health care are common in most former communist countries. This paper explores the demand side of these payments in Albania. Using tobit and Heckman selection models we control for individual determinants of informal payments in outpatient and inpatient health care....

Informal payments are deeply ingrained in the health care sector of most Central, Eastern and Southern European countries. Evidence suggests that the price paid informally to medical staff is negotiated either directly or indirectly between patients and medical staff. The aim of this paper is to...

The absent or poorly functioning risk pooling mechanisms and high amounts of out-of-pocket payments for health care expose households to financial risks associated with major illnesses or accidents. The aim of this paper is to analyse the extent to which out-of-pocket health spending impoverish...

This paper analyses the situation when employees fail to adapt to overall job dissatisfaction. By combining the existing knowledge in economics on job lock and in psychology on employees’ feeling of being ‘stuck’ at work, the paper explains why some employees fail to adapt when...

Out-of-pocket patient payments can impose a catastrophic burden on households. This problem may not only affect poor but also wealthy households who need to use health care frequently. The available literature offers no consensus on how to measure poverty and how to measure the effects of...

Outside the health care sector, consumer preferences have been effectively studied using rating and ranking conjoint techniques. In the health care sector this technique has received less attention than its choice-based variant. Applications of rating and ranking method to health care issues are...

In 2010, a household survey was carried out in Hungary among 1037 respondents to study consumer preferences and willingness to pay for health care services. In this paper, we use the data from the discrete choice experiments included in the survey, to elicit the preferences of health care...

The lack of systematic research on the assessment of patient payment policies emphasizes the need to evaluate the mechanisms of official patient charges. This paper aims to contribute to this research area by outlining a comprehensive framework for the assessment of patient payment policies, and...

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