Over the last decade two reforms have affected the Italian hospital system, one introducing market mechanisms, the other concerning the tools of planning and expense control assigned to the regional governments. The paper summarizes these institutional changes and describes the evolution of the...

This paper examines the major interest groups in the debate over allowing the wholesale re-importation of prescription drugs through the Pharmaceutical Market Access Act. By making use of the logit model, we see the effects that each of these groups has had on the voting behavior of the 108 th...

Does medical insurance affect health care demand and in the end contribute to improvements in the health status? Evidence for China for the year 2004, by means of the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), shows that health insurance does not affect health care demand in a significant manner....

We estimate the impact on health care utilization and out-of-pocket (OOP) expenditures of a major reform in Thailand that extended health insurance to one-quarter of the population to achieve universal coverage while keeping health spending below 4% of GDP. Identification is through comparison...

Physicians are supposed to serve patients' interests, but some are more inclined to do so than others. This paper studies how the system of health care provision affects the allocation of patients to physicians when physicians differ in altruism. We show that allowing for private provision of...

There is increasing empirical and experimental evidence thatproviding financial incentives to agents to performcertain socially desirable actions may permanently reduce other typesof motivations to undertake these actions.We study the impact of financial incentives on the desire for...

We provide evidence from a large-scale field experiment on the causal effects of audit rules on compliance in a market for long-term care. In this setting care should be provided quickly and, therefore, the gatekeeper introduced ex-post auditing. Our results do not show significant effects of...

We examine the effect of publicly provided health care on welfare by combining local level data on public health care, and individual level data on life satisfaction. It is shown that relatively high expenditures in health care have a positive effect on individuals' life satisfaction in our...

When public long-term care (LTC) insurance is provided by insurers, they typically lack incentives for purchasing cost-effective LTC. Providing insurers with appropriate incentives for efficiency without jeopardizing access for high-risk individuals requires, among other things, an adequate...

This discussion paper resulted in an article in <I>Health Economics</I> (2012). Volume 21, issue 4, pages 367-385.<P> Rapid urbanization could have positive and negative health effects, such that the net impact on population health is not obvious. It is, however, highly pertinent to the human welfare...</p></i>