We examine the launch of a mobile outpatient appointment app in China to study the effect of information provision and a streamlined appointment process on hospital operations and the alignment of healthcare supply and demand. Using a longitudinal dataset on hospital operations and a...

This paper analyzes the impact of service quality on patients' satisfaction with the Portuguese National Health Service, through a novel indicator the Index of Satisfaction with the NHS that measures the share of children delivered in the NHS hospitals to total number of children delivered, in...

This paper investigates how changes in hospital choice sets affect levels of patient demand for elective hospital care. We exploit a set of reforms in England that opened up the market for publicly-funded patients to private hospitals. Impacts on demand are estimated using variation in distance...

We consider an economy where most of the health care is publicly provided,and where there is waiting time for several types of treatments. Privatehealth care without waiting time is an option for the patients in the publichealth queue. We show that although patients with low waiting costs...

We exploit variation across Italian Regions in the implementation of region-specific tariffs within a Prospective Pay System (PPS) for hospitals based on Diagnosis Related Groups (DRG) to assess their impact on health and on the use of health care services. We consider survey data for the years...

The aging population, the increasing number of lifestyle diseases and the increasing proportion of difficult-to-cure illnesses in the EU demands the use of modern medicine and modern medical technology. Such a situation leads to an increase of funds spent on the health sector. Therefore the...

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...

Healthcare services are more widespread in Latin America and the Caribbean today than 50 years ago, yet this availability is not necessarily reflected in popular perceptions. This study documents the expansion of healthcare services in the Region in terms of medically-trained professionals,...

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....

The article deals with the issue of health care, focusing on expenditure allocated to it. The first part of the article reviews some selected European Union countries, analyzing their expenditure on their health care sectors. The second part brings an analysis of expenditure on health care in...