In this paper we document a process of price convergence in the European market for pharmaceutical products and relate it to access to innovative medicines in individual countries. The EU is a peculiar case study, where free circulation of goods coexists with pricing policies designed and...

Do healthcare providers pick their patients? This paper uses patient-level administrative data on skilled nursing facilities in California to estimate a structural model of selective admission practices in the nursing home industry. I exploit within-facility covariation between occupancy and...

Health insurances curb price insensitive behavior and moral hazard of insureds through different types of cost-sharing, such as tiered co-payments or reference pricing. This paper evaluates the effect of newly introduced price limits below which drugs are exempt from co-payments on the pricing...

On January 1, 2006, the federal government began providing insurance coverage for Medicare recipients' prescription drug expenditures through a new program known as Medicare Part D. Rather than setting pharmaceutical prices itself, the government contracted with private insurance plans to...

I use the Medicare Part D prescription drug insurance market to examine the dynamics of firm interaction with consumers on an insurance exchange. Enrollment data show that consumers face switching frictions leading to inertia in plan choice, and a regression discontinuity design indicates...

Public financing of private health insurance may generate external effects beyond the subsidized population, by influencing the size and bargaining power of health insurers. We test for this external effect in the context of Medicare Part D. We analyze how Part D-related insurer size increases...

We use a model of horizontal and vertical differentiation to study physicians’ incentives to provide quality in the physician-patient relationship under price regulation. If the price is the only regulatory variable, the social planner cannot implement the first-best policy. Moreover, the...

This paper studies the effects of price regulation and parallel imports in the on-patent pharmaceutical market. In a theory model where the producer price is subject to bargaining between the brand-name producer and a distributor, we show that the effects of stricter price regulation crucially...

We consider a setting of dual practice, where a physician offers free public treatment and, if allowed, a private treatment for which patients have to pay out of pocket. Private treatment is superior in terms of health outcomes but more costly and time intensive. For the latter reason it...

This paper analyses simultaneous regulation of cost and quality when firms have private, correlated information about productivity and the regulator receives a signal about quality. It is shown that managerial effort and expenditures on quality are positively correlated in the optimal contract....