I consider the problem of evaluating the effect of a health care reform on the demand for doctor visits when the effect is potentially different in different parts of the outcome distribution. Quantile regression is a useful technique for studying such heterogeneous treatment effects. Recent...

Several studies of health system responsiveness focus on the demand-side by investigating the association between socio-demographic characteristics of patients and their reported level of responsiveness. However, little is known about the influence of supply-side factors. This paper addresses...

This paper considers the influence of patients' characteristics on their evaluation of a health system's responsiveness, that is, a system's ability to respond to the legitimate expectations of potential users regarding non-health enhancing aspects of care (Valentine et al. 2003a). Since...

Several studies of health system responsiveness focus on the demand-side by investigating the association between socio-demographic characteristics of patients and their reported level of responsiveness. However, little is known about the influence of supply-side factors. This paper addresses...

Each year about 20% of the 10 million hospital inpatients in Italy get admitted to hospitals outside the Local Health Authority of residence. In this paper we carefully explore this phenomenon and estimate gravity equations for "trade" in hospital care using a Poisson pseudo maximum likelihood...

This document states the hypothesis that there are some cultural factors that are negatively related to health care utilization. Evidence of maternal health care is used to assess the hypothesis. Two different dependent variables are used, antenatal care and delivery assistance with a health...

This paper analyses whether tax subsidies to private medical insurance are self-financing by means of a structural approach. We construct a simulation routine based on a microeconometric discrete choice model that allows us to evaluate the impact of premium changes on outpatient health care...

This paper investigated the delivery of health services based on data recorded at two medium-sized hospitals: Erenkoy Mental Health Research and Training Hospital located in Istanbul/Turkey and LVR-Klinik Viersen in Germany. A comparison of quality management systems in terms of certification...

Competition among health insurers is widely considered to be a means of enhancing efficiency and containing costs in the health care system. In this paper, it is argued that this could be unsuccessful since health care providers hold a strong position on the market for health care services....

Many health economists demand more competition in the health care system. They focus on the competition between sickness funds for insured and the competition between health care providers for contracts with sickness funds. But they neglect the competition between health care providers for...