This expository paper describes the factors that contribute to failure of health insurance markets, and the regulatory mechanisms that have been and can be used to combat these failures. Standardized contracts and creditable coverage mandates are discussed, along with premium support, enrollment...

Both under- and over-treatment of communicable diseases are public bads. But efforts to decrease one run the risk of increasing the other. Using rich experimental data on household treatment-seeking behavior in Kenya, we study the implications of this tradeoff for subsidizing life-saving...

Roughly 30 percent of all Canadian healthcare is privately paid for, about the same proportion as the average for the 34 industrialized countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). However, two things make Canada’s public-private mix unique....

Most current environmental policy analyses use Value of a Statistical Life (VSL) figures inferred from workplace safety and traffic accident contexts to compute the benefits of environmental programs that avoid premature deaths. There is considerable debate about the appropriateness of this...

Using paper and pencil experiments administered in senior centers, we examine decision-making performance in multi-attribute decision problems. We differentiate the effects of declining cognitive performance and changing cognitive process on decision-making performance of seniors as they age. We...

We investigate the density of non-contract (private) physicians in a two-tiered health care system, i.e., one with co-existing public and private health care providers. In particular, we analyze how the densities of private and public suppliers of outpatient health care (general practitioners...

Recent focus on cost-benefit/socio-economic assessment of government “life-saving” programmes within public health, pharmaceutics, transport, and civil contingencies has spurred a wave of empirical research on the value of a statistical life (VSL) in Sweden. This paper provides an overview...

I analyze the relationship between health care institutions and the utilization of outpatient services by individuals aged 50 and above. I use cross-sectional micro data from thirteen European countries. I focus on the out-of-pocket costs of health care utilization, the gatekeeper role of...

We argue that policy analysis aiming at curving inequalities in health calls for a better understanding of what we know about its measurement pathways. Assuming that health is a good that individuals trade off against other goods, unavoidable health inequalities result when after controlling for...

The aim of our paper is to analyse the effect of the so-called performance volume limit (PVL) financing method on acute hospital care.