In 2004, the German Social Health Insurance introduced a co-payment for the first doctor visit in a calendar quarter. I combine a structural model of health care demand and a difference-in-differences strategy to estimate the effect of that reform on the number of visits. In the model, the...

This paper compares the cost and quality incentive effects of cost reimbursement and prospective payment systems in the health industry when providers are altruistic. Providers' behavioral rule is governed by a desire to maximize a weighted sum of profit and consumers' health benefit. When...

We construct a stochastic model of illness, death and treatment choice to analyze two proposals -- legally-binding advance directives and insurer-paid compensation schemes -- to reduce the incidence of aggressive and possibly futile end-of-life treatment. We assess whether, in a competitive...

Equity in health has to be distinguished from equity in access to health care, or equity in the distribution of health care resources. We take as a working definition of health for our purposes the number of quality adjusted life years that a person may expect to enjoy over his or her lifetime....

We examine the strategic interaction in the market for physician services when the total budget for reimbursement is fixed. We show that this prospective payment system involves - compared to a fee-for-service remuneration system - a severe coordination problem, which potentially leads to the...

The authors present a generalized solution to Grossman’s model of health capital (1972), relaxing the widely used assumption that individuals can adjust their health stock instantaneously to an “optimal” level without adjustment costs. The Grossman model then predicts the existence of a...