A health care system is efficient when an increase in spending results in significant improvements in the health of a population. We test the relative efficiency of public and private health care spending in reducing infant and child mortality using cross-national data for 163 countries. There...

Foundation Trusts (FTs) were introduced in the English NHS in 2004/5 and gave NHS Trusts the opportunity to become independent not-for-profit public benefit corporations. Whilst remaining in the public sector, FTs were granted greater autonomy than non-FTs. The reform was intended to create...

Eating disorders are an important and growing health concern, and bulimia nervosa (BN) accounts for the largest fraction of eating disorders. Health consequences of BN are substantial and especially serious given the increasingly compulsive nature of the disorder. However, remarkably little is...

In this paper, the authors study optimal risk adjustment in imperfectly competitive health insurance markets when high-risk consumers are less likely to switch insurer than low-risk consumers.<font face="CMR10" size="3"><font face="CMR10" size="3">First, they find that insurers still have an incentive to select even if risk adjustment perfectly...</font></font>

The aim of the study is to explore the factors those differentiate health related quality of life (HRQOL) among hepatitis B (HBV) and hepatitis C (HCV) patients. Different public and private hospitals of Sargodha district were visited and 120 patients of hepatitis B and C were interviewed. World...

This study considers the dependence between functional decline and depression in a nationally representative sample of older Americans from the Survey on Assets and Health Dynamics among the Oldest Old (AHEAD) covering the years from 1993 to 2002. Previous research has shown that depression is a...

A key issue surrounding employer benefit mandates is the incidence on workers through wages and employment. In this paper, we address this question using a pay-or-play policy implemented in San Francisco in 2008 that requires employers to either provide health benefits or contribute to a public...

We examine provider responses to the Medicare inpatient rehabilitation facility (IRF) prospective payment system (PPS), which simultaneously reduced marginal reimbursement and increased average reimbursement. IRFs could respond to the PPS by changing the total number of patients admitted,...

In US vaccine markets, competing producers with high fixed, sunk costs face relatively concentrated demand. The resulting price and quality competition leads to the exit of all but one or very few producers per vaccine. Our empirical analysis of exits from US vaccine markets supports the...

This paper examines positive externalities and complementarities in the use of antiviral pharmaceuticals to mitigate pandemic influenza. The paper demonstrates the presence of treatment externalities in simple epidemiological SIR models, and then through simulations of a Global Epidemiological...