Abstract ; Background: The health care reform of 2004 was intended to reduce moral hazard in the statutory health insurance through various financial incentives. An important element of the reform has been the introduction of a per-quarter fee for doctor visits. The second part of the reform has...

Hurdle models based on the zero-truncated Poisson-lognormal distribution are rarely used in applied work, although they incorporate some advantages compared with their negative binomial alternatives. I present a command that enables Stata users to estimate Poisson-lognormal hurdle models. I use...

When health insurance reforms involve non-linear price schedules tied to payment periods (for example, a quarter or a year), the empirical analysis of its effects has to take the within-period time structure of incentives into account. The analysis is further complicated when demand data are...

Theoretical considerations suggest that nonlinear health care price schedules have heterogeneous effects on health care demand. In this paper, we develop and apply a finite mixture bivariate probit model to analyze whether there are heterogeneous reactions to the introduction of a nonlinear...

The German health care reform of 2004 imposes a charge of 10 Euro for the first visit to a doctor in each quarter of the year. Exploiting random variation in the interview day of the German Socio-Economic Panel, this study finds a substantial effect of the new fee on the probability of visiting...

Theoretical considerations suggest that nonlinear health care price schedules have heterogeneous effects on health care demand. In this paper, we develop and apply a finite mixture bivariate probit model to analyze whether there are heterogeneous reactions to the introduction of a nonlinear...