The aim of this research is to better understand the effects of a decentralized health system of the Philippines on public health care expenditures by investigating determinants of local government public health spending for year 2007. Within the context of the Philippines’ decentralized...

The article analyzes to which extent residential proximity from an emergency hospital affects the probability of surviving an acute myocardial infarction (AMI). The critical time aspect in AMI treatment provides an ideal application for evaluating this proximity-outcome hypothesis. Previous...

Ambulance response time to emergency calls is a key indicator of a health system's efficiency although its impact on health is not precisely known. This causal relation is identified by exploiting rainfall at the time of the ambulance run as a shock to responsiveness. The elasticity of the...

The concentration of hospital capacities often involves closures of smaller hospital sites. While advocates of hospital concentrations emphasize increased quality of care and cost savings, some people may feel their health care is at risk. In this paper, I analyze the effect of 18 recent...

HIV continues to cause the largest number of disability-adjusted life years of any disease in HIV hyperendemic countries (i.e., countries with an adult HIV prevalence 15%). We compare the benefits and costs of two proven biological interventions to reduce the health losses due to the HIV...

HIV continues to cause the largest number of disability-adjusted life years of any disease in HIV hyperendemic countries (i.e., countries with an adult HIV prevalence 15%). We compare the benefits and costs of two proven biological interventions to reduce the health losses due to the HIV...

Health systems in Western countries are plagued by inefficiency and will likely require a substantial increase in the tax burden as populations age. Patients might also face a gradual decrease in the quality and scope of services. The organisational changes needed to drive costs down and...

In the last decades, demographic change coupled with new and expensive medical innovations have put most health care systems in developed countries under financial pressure. Therefore, ensuring efficient service provision is essential for a sustainable health care system. This paper investigates...

We develop a general framework for optimal health policy design in a dynamic setting. We consider a hypothetical medical intervention for a cohort of patients where one parameter varies across cohorts with imperfectly observable linear dynamics. We seek to identify the optimal time to change the...