In October 2002, a substitution reform was introduced in the Swedish pharmaceuticals market. In this paper, the effects of increased price competition due to the reform on the entry of new pharmaceutical products were studied. The results show that the reform did affect the entry behavior of...

We analyze changes in the willingness to substitute from prescribed pharmaceuticals to more affordable generic equivalents in response to the first experience with a substitution. Using Swedish individual-level data of prescribed and dispensed pharmaceuticals, we employ a dynamic event study and...

This paper uses a labor supply model that incorporates waiting for health care to derive an empirical specification for sick leave and to estimate the impact of waiting for health care on the duration of sick leave. In the estimations, we use the 2002 sample of the RFV-LS register database,...

Background: The aim was: i) to quantify the direct and indirect savings from parallel imports in Sweden during a period when sellers were forbidden from giving discounts to pharmacies, and ii) to study if the efects of competition from parallel imports on list prices became smaller in absolute...

Physicians' decisions whether or not to veto generic substitution were analyzed using a sample of 350,000 pharmaceutical prescriptions from the county of Västerbotten, Sweden. Although generic substitution reforms have been introduced in many European countries and American states, this is to...

In democracies, elections are the primary mechanism for making politicians act in voters' interests, but voters are unable to prevent that some resources are diverted to political rents. With two levels of government, the rents are reduced if voters require higher beneficial public expenditures...

This paper reports on a study of the prescribing physician's influence on consumers' choice between medically equivalent pharmaceuticals. The study was performed using a dataset of 666,000 observations in which consumers were asked whether they were prepared to pay the price difference in order...

The price effects of the Swedish pharmaceutical substitution reform are analyzed using data for a panel of all pharmaceutical product sold in Sweden in 1997--2007. The price reduction due to the reform was estimated to average 10% and was found to be significantly larger for brand name...

This thesis consists of a summary and four papers. The first two concerns health care and sickness absence, and the last two pharmaceutical costs and prices. <p> Paper [I] presents an economic federation model which resembles the situation in, for example, Sweden. In the model the state governments...</p>