This paper demonstrates why an increased quantity of funding as claimed by big health lenders is not effective to achieve Millennium Development Goal 6, stopping the spread of HIV by 2015. An alternative funding mechanism linking the disbursement of matching grants with a minimum provision level is suggested. In order to study the impact of conditional subsidies on the efficiency of internation...

This paper provides fi eld evidence on (a) how price framing aff ects consumers’ decision to switch health insurance plans and (b) how the price elasticity of demand for health insurance can be infl uenced by policymakers through simple regulatory eff orts. In 2009, in order to foster competition among health insurance companies, German federal regulation required health insurance companies to ...

Relative Efficiency, Scale Effect, and Scope Effect of Public Hospitals: Evidence from Australia Using the 1997-1998 New South Wales public-hospitals comparison data, we investigate the hospital-level inefficiency by applying a stochastic-frontier multiproduct cost function. We use a flexible translog cost function to reduce the measurement errors of the outputs of the hospital. The main findin...

Hospital acquired infections (HAI) are a largely avoidable and costly burden on public health systems. Accurate estimates of the costs of HAI are necessary to gauge the cost efficiency of alternative infection control measures, but are traditionally very difficult to compute. In particular, existing studies of the costs of HAI do not take into account the possible endogeneity bias between the r...

Deductibles in health insurance are often regarded as a means to contain health care costs when the behaviour of individuals exhibits moral hazard. However, in the absence of moral hazard, voluntarily chosen deductibles rather lead to adverse selection. I use a set of new variables in the German Socioeconomic Panel for the years 2002, 2004 and 2006 that measure individual health more accurately...

This paper empirically assesses the relative role of health plan prices, service quality and optional benefi ts in the decision to choose a health plan. We link representative German SOEP panel data from 2007 to 2010 to (i) health plan service quality indicators, (ii) measures of voluntary benefi t provision on top of federally mandated benefi ts, and (iii) health plan prices for almost all Ger...

In 2003 the Government of Ghana established a National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) to improve health care access for Ghanaians and eventually replace the cashand-carry system. This study evaluates the NHIS to determine whether it is fulfi lling its purpose in the context of the Millennium Development Goals #4 and #5 which deal with the health of women and children. We use Propensity Score Ma...

High school dropout is an important policy issue and its determinants are a longstanding interest of economics. However, very little is known on the roles of noncognitive traits in influencing school dropout decisions. We employ voluntary forgone health care as a proxy for the underlying noncognitive traits that may induce adolescents to dropout and estimate its effects on early school attritio...

There is growing interest in discrete-choice experiments (DCE) as a method to elicit consumers' preferences in the health care sector. Increasingly this method is used to determine willingness-to-pay (WTP) for health-related goods. However, its external validity in the health care domain has not been investigated until today. This paper examines the external validity of DCE concerning the reduc...

The regulation of health insurance is an important and often controversial issue. Rules intended to improve access to insurance for high risk consumer have the potential to reduce overall coverage by inducing adverse selection. This paper examines the issue of adverse selection in the context of the market for private health insurance in Australia, where premiums are required to be community ra...