We analyze the economic consequences of rising health care prices in the US. Using exposure to price increases caused by horizontal hospital mergers as an instrument, we show that rising prices raise the cost of labor by increasing employer-sponsored health insurance premiums. A 1% increase in...

We provide comparable evidence on the patterns and trends in obesity across the Atlantic and analyse whether there are economic rationales for public intervention to control obesity. We take into account equity issues as well as efficiency considerations, which are organized around three...

The apparently unrelenting growth in the GDP-share of health spending (SHS) has been a perennial issue of policy concern. Does an equilibrium limit exist? The issue has been left open in recent dynamic models which take income growth and population aging as given. We view these variables as...

Governments often subsidize poorer groups in society to ensure their access to new drugs. We analyze here the optimal income-based price subsidies in a strategic environment. We show that asymmetric health systems can arise even though countries are ex-ante symmetric when international price...

In health markets, government policies tend to subsidize poorer groups. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the implications of an income-based subsidy policy on the incentives of countries to implement price arbitrage and of firms to provide market access to poorer groups.

Indian government launched the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY), a national health insurance scheme, in 2008 that provides cashless health services to poor households in India. We evaluate the impact of RSBY on RSBY beneficiary households' (average treatment impact on the treated)...

The nation's spending for prescription drugs has grown dramatically in recent years. Previous studies have shown that the replacement of older drugs by newer, more expensive, drugs is the single most important reason for this increase, but they did not measure how much of the difference between...

Between 1960 and 1997, life expectancy at birth of Americans increased approximately 10% G from 69.7 to 76.5 years G and it has been estimated that the value of life extension during this period nearly equaled the gains in tangible consumption. While life expectancy has tended to increase, there...

U.S. federal and state governments rarely regulate healthcare price levels, but do regulate price changes for pharmaceuticals, hospitals, and health insurance. Previous research showed that limiting price increases can raise launch prices and reduce both profit and social welfare, assuming...

The global framework for financing development, adopted in 2015, places great emphasis on mobilizing domestic resources to finance the Sustainable Development Goals, which include universal healthcare. In a recent paper Reeves et al. (2015) attribute progress towards universal healthcare to...