We study the role of health care within a continuous time economy of overlapping generations subject to endogenous mortality. The economy consists of two sectors: final goods production and a health care sector, selling medical services to individuals. Individuals demand health care with a view...

Medical technological progress has been shown to be the main driver of health care costs. A key policy question is whether new treatment options are worth the additional costs. In this paper we assess the causal effect of percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA), a major new heart...

We investigate the impact of early-life medical interventions on low-risk newborn health. A policy rule in The Netherlands creates large discontinuities in medical treatments at gestational week 37. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find no health benefits from additional treatments...

The Czech health care system is doing well in terms of health outcomes compared to other Central East European economies that inherited similar health systems after the transition and has been converging to OECD averages. However, benchmarking the Czech health system to countries with comparable...

One cornerstone of current attempts to reform the German public health care system by introducing private insurance schemes is the assumption that economic incentives play an important role in individual decision-making about using medical help. This hypothesis is examined for the case of demand...

We investigate the spillover effects of early-life medical treatments on the siblings of treated children. We use a regression discontinuity design that exploits changes in medical treatments across the very low birth weight (VLBW) cutoff. Using administrative data from Denmark, we first confirm...

We investigate the effect of variations in the price of opium in Afghanistan on per capita dispensation of prescription opioids in the US. Quarterly county-level data for 2003-2016 indicate that reductions in opium prices significantly increase the quantity of opioids prescribed. The increase...

In Germany, private health insurance covers more innovative and costly treatments than public insurance. Moreover, privately insured individuals are treated preferentially by doctors. In this article, I use subjective health data to examine whether these superior features of private insurance...

This paper examines the behaviour of public hospitals in response to the average payment incentives created by price changes for patients classified in different Diagnosis Related Groups (DRGs). Using panel data on public hospitals located within the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna, we test...