In times of ever-rising health expenditures it is becoming more and more obvious that conventional models for funding health care are increasingly experiencing difficulties in meeting up this challenge. The concept of Medical Savings Accounts (MSAs) represents an innovative and so far rarely...

Das Konzept der Medical Savings Accounts als Instrument zur Finanzierung von Gesundheitssystemen hat in den letzten Jahren international Aufmerksamkeit erregt. In Deutschland wurde ein ähnliches Konzept für die Gesetzliche Rentenversicherung im Rahmen der "Riester Rente" diskutiert. Länder...

This paper analyses the impact of health foreign assistance on physicians' brain drain. We use the database from Bhargava and Docquier (2008) to explain physicians' brain drain and health foreign assistance from 1995 to 2003 using a bilateral gravity equation model. In the first time, we propose...

Das faktisch umlagefinanzierte Gesundheitswesen der Gesetzlichen Krankenversicherung steht in Anbetracht der demografischen Entwicklung nach wie vor massiven Finanzierungsproblemen gegenüber. Das Wettbewerbsstärkungsgesetz sollte daher ursprünglich nicht nur Ausgangspunkt für weitere...

We study the relationship between height stature and child mortality in West Africa. This is motivated by two things: understanding the determinants of height, widely used health indicator, and explaining the « double African paradox ». This paradox comes from the fact that Africans are...

The costs of HIV/AIDS programs are significant from a macroeconomic or fiscal perspective in a number of countries. Assessing the fiscal implications is complicated by the long lags between infection and the need for HIV/AIDS-related services, and the long duration over which these services...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the role of public health insurance in mitigating adverse outcomes associated with health shocks. Exploiting the rollout of a universal health insurance program in rural China, I find that total household income and consumption are fully insured against...

One of the most robust findings in health economics is that higher-educated individuals tend to be in better health. This paper tests whether health disparities across education are to some extent due to differences in reporting error across education. We test this hypothesis using data from the...

While recent research finds strong evidence that birth order affects children's outcomes such as education, IQ scores, and earnings, the evidence for effects on health is more limited. This paper uses a large dataset on the population of Norway and focuses on the effect of birth order on a range...

Studies of deprivation usually ignore mental illness. This paper uses household panel data from the USA, Australia, Britain and Germany to broaden the analysis. We ask first how many of those in the lowest levels of life-satisfaction suffer from unemployment, poverty, physical ill health, and...