Aim: To assess the impact of early intervention (EI) services on service costs for people with first-episode psychosis. Methods: A decision model was constructed to map the care pathways following input from EI services and from standard care. A Markov process was used to run the model over 18...

This paper examines whether or not hospital competition in a market with fixed reimbursement prices can prompt improvements in clinical quality. In January 2006, the British Government introduced a major extension of their market-based reforms to the English National Health Service. From January...

Improving prescription drug quality is an essential health policy goal in modern health systems, though evidence on the available instruments to attain such a goal are scarce. Cost sharing has an arguable role in improving the likelihood of an individual obtaining an appropriate prescription....

This paper examines the arguments for changing the ways that UK drug prices are regulated. In the UK, NHS pharmaceutical expenditures on branded drugs, currently worth about £3 billion a year, have been regulated by the Pharmaceutical Price Regulation Scheme (PPRS) since 1978. We argue that, in...

We use variation in oil output among Brazilian municipalities to investigate the effects of resource windfalls. We find muted effects of oil through market channels: offshore oil has no effect on municipal non-oil GDP or its composition, while onshore oil has only modest effects on non-oil GDP...

The thesis collects four essays in the fields of competition and innovation economics. In chapter 1, we review the recent growth literature that analyses the effects of product market competition on growth. Contrary to the negative effect predicted by the early endogenous growth models, this...

Chapter 1 introduces the thesis providing an overview of the common themes and methods underlying this research. Chapter 2 reports an experiment that examines the characteristics of effective leaders in a leader-follower voluntary contributions game. We focus on two factors: leaders’...

The evaluation of economic forecasts is a substantial and important aspect of economic research, and a considerable part of such evaluation is performed by comparing competing forecasts. This thesis focuses on the development of statistical procedures in order that reliable comparison of...

Intellectual property (IP) regimes serve dual purposes: to provide incentives for the generation and commercialization of innovations and to foster dissemination and use of knowledge. An IP regime alone cannot maximize these two objectives simultaneously. After all, IP establishes incentives to...

The aim of this thesis is to help the RM industry avoid misguidedly investing in technologies that are unlikely to be cost-effective and reimbursed by healthcare providers. Health economics provides the tools to demonstrate value for money. These tools are typically used by healthcare providers...