This paper examines the tradeoffs of monitoring for wasteful public spending. By penalizing unnecessary spending, monitoring improves the quality of public expenditure and incentivizes firms to invest in compliance technology. I study a large Medicare program that monitored for unnecessary...

Moral hazard and provider-induced demand may contribute to overutilization of scarce health care resources. The U.S. health care system includes several compensatory cost-containment mechanisms, but their effects depend on how patients and providers respond. We investigate hospice programs'...

As health care costs continue to rise, medical expenses have become an increasingly important contributor to financial risk. Economic theory suggests that when background risk rises, individuals will reduce their exposure to other risks. This paper presents a test of this theory by examining the...

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. --...

This paper constructs a simple overlapping generations model to examine how the choice of public and private health expenditure is affected by preferences and economic factors under majority voting. In the model, agents with heterogeneous income decide how much to consume, save, and invest in...

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...

Despite spending far more on medical care, Americans live shorter lives than the citizens of other high-income countries. The situation has been getting worse for at least three decades. This paper describes the main scientific methods for guiding the allocation of resources to health -...

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...

Major disparities in the cost of health care have made the pricing of specialist and hospital services a contentious issue in South Africa, particularly in the private sector. To help inform policy debate, this paper profiles selected experiences on the pricing of health services, competition...