This study examines the relationship between healthcare expenditure and disposable income in the 50 US states over the period 1966-2009 using fractional integration and cointegration techniques. The degree of integration and non-linearity of both series are found to vary considerably across...

As Latin American countries seek to expand the coverage and benefits provided by their health systems under a global drive for universal health coverage (UHC), decisions taken today – whether by government or individuals – will have an impact tomorrow on public spending requirements. To...

This paper is the first to use the method of coarsened exact matching (CEM) to estimate the impact of mood disorders on medical care costs in order to address the endogeneity of mood disorders. Models are estimated using restricted-use, general practice patient records data from New Zealand for...

Despite the rapidly aging population, relatively little is known about how cost sharing affects the elderly's medical spending. Exploiting longitudinal claims data and the drastic reduction of coinsurance from 30% to 10% at age 70 in Japan, we find that the elderly's demand responses are...

In a pervasive but controversial practice, drug firms frequently make monetary or in-kind payments to medical providers. Critics are concerned that drug firms are distorting prescribing behavior away from the best interests of patients, while defenders of the practice claim that payments arise...

Since January 2006 all Medicare beneficiaries have been eligible to obtain outpatient prescription drug coverage through private stand-alone drug plans (PDPs). We estimate a model of beneficiary demand for PDPs and use it to compute the loss of consumer surplus due to tightening PDP formularies...

Hospitals anchor much of US health care and receive a third of all medical spending, including various subsidies. Nevertheless, some become insolvent and exit the market. Research has documented subsequent access problems; however, less is understood about broader implications. We examine over...

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the evolution of health care expenditure in Spain during the period 1980-1997, and henceforth to comment on the cost containment measures put forward to control its growth. The paper is divided into three separate sections. The first offers...

One of the goals of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) debt initiative is to provide additional resources for basic health care to the population of eligible developing countries. In this paper I investigate the effect of debt relief on per capita health expenditure in a sample of...

Health care usually represents a so called merit good, i.e. a good whose consumption should be promoted and given that in most cases it might be essential to restore health or to stop its decay, most countries have implemented a public health care system where care is supplied to anybody needing...