Innovation is part idea generation and part development. We build a model of "innovating-by-doing," whereby ideas come to practitioners. Successful innovation requires that practitioners' ideas be developed through costly effort. Our model nests existing theories of laboratory research and...

In the first two quarters of 2013 the Georgian government introduced and fully implemented a universal health care (UHC) plan covering all those not-yet publicly or privately insured. We estimate the effect of the introduction of the universal healthcare plan on the level of out-of-pocket (OOP)...

Innovation is part idea generation and part development. We build a model of “innovating-bydoing,” whereby ideas come to practitioners. Successful innovation requires that practitioners’ideas be developed through costly effort. Our model nests existing theories of laboratory researchand...

I study the effect of health insurance expansions on medical innovation. Practitioner dominated innovation (Roberts, 1988) creates an important role for the incentives in “local” payment systems as drivers of medical technology development. I show that, over the 15 years following Medicare...

I study the channels through which health insurance influences medical innovation. Following Medicare and Medicaid's passage, I find that U.S.-based medical-equipment patenting rose by 40 to 50 percent relative to both other U.S. patenting and foreign medical-equipment patenting. Within the...

Mental illness is a leading cause of disability worldwide with vast costs to society. Yet, insurance coverage for effective treatments remains limited. This paper revisits the Offset Hypothesis, which claims insurance coverage for psychotherapy is self-financing through reductions in the use of...

Die derzeit aufkeimende Systemkritik am deutschen Gesundheitswesen suggeriert, dass die zur unmittelbaren Gefahrenabwehr notwendige, von der Exekutive geprägte Steuerungslogik über die Krisenbewältigung hinaus zu vorteilhafteren Ergebnissen führe. Einfache Überlegungen und Indikatoren...

The United States spends substantially more on health care than most developed countries, yet leaves a greater share of the population uninsured. We suggest that incremental insurance expansions focused on addressing market failures will propagate inefficiencies and are not likely to facilitate...

The paper aims at the correspondence of the health care financing systems to the social models (welfare regimes) as defined in the social theory and policy, including the trends in the OECD and CEE countries and utilizing the lessons from typical countries. We compare the liberal,...

We study medical progress within an economy of overlapping generations subject to endogenous mortality. Individuals demand health care with a view to lowering mortality over their life-cycle. We characterise the individual optimum and the general equilibrium of the economy and study the impact...