The aim of this paper is to model a liberal profession, in this case physicians. We propose a model in which the physician acts in the same way as an agent who maximises his utility function subject to his budget constraint, while at the same time being able to affect his rate of remuneration....

The observable difference between "demand inducement" and "promotion" or "sales" is subjective and difficult to measure. Demand inducement has a pejorative connotation and is usually associated with significant asymmetric information. The evidence supporting the supplier-induced demand...

It is not uncommon that publicly employed physicians also have income from work outside the hospital, often termed moonlighting. There is little empirical evidence of such activity. In this paper we investigate which factors that may influence physicians’ choice of work between the public...

This chapter reviews the literature devoted to studying markets for health care services and health insurance. There has been tremendous growth and progress in this field. A tremendous amount of new research has been done since the publication of the first volume of this Handbook. In addition,...

Compared to most Canadian provinces, Québec is endowed with a large and fast growing number of family doctors relative to its population. In spite of this, Québec’s family physicians and the general public regularly report that provincial residents have poor access to healthcare services....

We study the choice of drug for the treatment of high blood pressure (hypertension) in Sweden between 1988-1994. During this time period calcium antagonists and ACE-inhibitors increased their market shares at the expense of the older drugs diuretics and beta-blockers. We use a prescription micro...

The paper evaluates the German health care reform of 1997, using the individual number of doctor visits as outcome measure. A new econometric model, the Probit-Poisson-log-normal model with correlated errors, describes the data better than existing count data models. Moreover, it has an...

The German health care reform of 1997 provides a natural experiment for evaluating the price sensitivity of demand for physicians' services. As a part of the reform, co-payments for prescription drugs were increased step up to 200%. However, certain groups of people were exempted from the...