Infectious diseases are is currently the main cause of mortality in the world and have been even more important historically. This paper reviews recent research in economic epidemiology. Specifically, it discusses the occurrence of infectious diseases and the effects of public health...

This article describes the anatomy of health insurance. It begins by considering the optimal design of health insurance policies. Such policies must make tradeoffs appropriately between risk sharing on the one hand and agency problems such as moral hazard (the incentive of people to seek more...

This chapter reviews the theory and empirical literature on physician market power, behavior, and motives, referred to collectively as the issue of "physician agency." The chapter is organized around an increasingly complex view of the demand conditions facing a physician, beginning with the...

A number of health care systems use waiting time as a rationing device for access to inpatient care. However, a considerable amount of research has focussed in particular on the UK's National Health Service and its perceived problem of waiting "lists". In this chapter a theoretical discussion...

This chapter reviews the literature on payment schemes for government purchases of health services. It focuses on four themes: (1) the tension between obtaining appropriate quality of services and keeping the cost of those services at an acceptable level; (2) the role of cost sharing by the...

The paper surveys the economics literature on equity in health care financing and delivery. The focus is, for the most part, on empirical work, especially that involving international and temporal comparisons. There is, however, some discussion of the concept and definition of equity. The...

This chapter provides an overview of the literature on child health in developed countries. I first lay out a simple economic model of the demand for child health inputs, and discuss whether the evidence is consistent with that model. Next, two main causes of market failure in the market for...

Consumer incentives are reflected in a wide range of choices, many of which occur in both insurance- and tax-financed health care systems. However, health insurance and sick leave pay cause consumer incentives to be reflected in moral hazard effects of several types. Theoretically, ex ante moral...

A decade ago, Newhouse (1987) assessed the balance of trade between imports from the econometrics literature into health economics, and exports from health economics to a wider audience. While it is undoubtedly true that imports of concepts and techniques still dominate the balance, the...

Health care markets fail to satisfy many requirements for perfect competition, including large numbers of consumers and firms, zero search costs, and marketability of all goods and services. Over time, health care markets have evolved to overcome the resulting inefficiencies. We combine the...