This paper investigates physician altruism toward patients’ health benefit using behavioral data from the fully incentivized laboratory experiment of Hennig-Schmidt et al. (2011). This setup identifies both physicians’ profits and patients’ health benefit resulting from medical treatment...

Background: Health care systems in many countries are characterized by limited availability of provider performance data that can be used to design and implement welfare improving reforms in the health sector. We question whether a simple mystery shopper scheme can be an effective measure to...

Background: Health care systems in many countries are characterized by limited availability of provider performance data that can be used to design and implement welfare improving reforms in the health sector. We question whether a simple mystery shopper scheme can be an effective measure to...

This paper investigates physician altruism toward patients’ health benefit using behavioral data from Hennig-Schmidt et al.'s (2011) laboratory experiment. In the experiment, medical students in the role of physicians decide on the provision of medical services. The experimental setup allows...

We study gatekeeping physicians’ referrals of patients to specialty care. We derive theoretical results when competition in the physician market intensifies. First, due to competitive pressure, physicians refer patients to specialty care more often. Second, physicians earn more by treating...

Using register data for the entire Norwegian population aged 50-89 in 1980-1999, in which there are ¾ million deaths, it is estimated how the proportions who are divorced or never-married in the municipality affect all-cause mortality, net of individual marital status. The data include...

Discrete-time hazard models for cancer mortality in cancer patients were estimated from register and census data to find out whether various socio-economic, ideational and institutional community factors had an impact on cancer survival in Norway in the 1990s, also beyond that of the...

When assessing health benefits of increased education in developing countries, many researchers have been concerned about the omission of important determinants of education from the models. This study illustrates that one should also be concerned about the limitations of the individual-level...