In the last few years there has been an increasing public pressure in many countries to contain costs in the healthcare sector, leading many national governments to introduce some form of prospective payment system and to reduce the scope for global budgeting. In this paper we investigate...

The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization sparked the most profound transformation of the landscape of abortion access in 50 years. We provide the first estimates of the effects of this decision on fertility using a pre-registered synthetic...

This paper investigates the consequences that patients face when their regular primary care provider closes down her practice, typically due to retirement. We estimate the causal impact of closures on patients' utilization patterns, medical expenditures, hospitalizations, and health plan choice....

This article examines how the Government third way is being implemented in relation to the involvement of primary care professionals in the commissioning of health services. Prior to 1997, the single preferred model of GP fundholding evolved into a diversity of approaches to commissioning and...

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...

Reforms to public services have extended consumer choice by allowing for the entry of private providers. The aim is to generate competitive pressure to improve quality when consumers choose between providers. However, for many services new entrants could also affect whether a consumer demands...

The effect of competition on the quality of health care remains a contested issue. Most empirical estimates rely on inference from non-experimental data. In contrast, this paper exploits a pro-competitive policy reform to provide estimates of the impact of competition on hospital outcomes. The...

The paper studies the short run and long run effects of the introduction of a Pay-for-Performance, P4P, payment scheme. Providers of a public service are assumed to employ more than one agent. If agents have different attitude to the job (for example only a portion of the agents has some form of...

Although economic literature has recently started to concentrate on the design, the scope and the regulations of main public programmes of Long-Term-Care in Europe, no analysis have, so far, compared different systems in terms of their degree of inclusiveness with respect to vulnerable elderly's...