Religious Minorities and Provision of Public Goods: Evidence from Rural West Bengal Religious and ethnic minorities across the world face partisan treatment with regard to provision of public goods, either as outcome of discriminatory practices or due to historical antecedents, such as the caste and religious divides in India. In several districts of West Bengal in India concentration of religi...

We seek to explain why countries have adopted national Old-Age Insurance and Health Insurance programs. Theoretical work has posited several factors that could lead to this adoption: the strain from expanding capitalism; the need for political legitimacy; the desire to transfer to similar people; increased wealth; and the outcome of leviathan government. We relate the probability of a country’s...

This paper studies the impact of tax-financed universal health coverage schemes on macroeconomic aspects of labor supply, asset holding, inequality, and welfare, while taking into account features common to developing economies, such as informal employment and tax avoidance, by constructing a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents. Agents have different education...

Assessing the Effectiveness of Health Care Cost Containment Measures Using SOEP panel data and difference-in-differences methods, this study is the first to empirically evaluate the effectiveness of four different health care cost containment measures within an integrated framework. The four measures investigated were introduced in Germany in 1997 to reduce moral hazard and public health expend...

We compare state-of-the-art implementation of Benefit Cost Analysis (BCA) and Cost Utility Analysis (CUA) as tools for making priorities in allocation of national public funds in the transport sector and health sector, respectively, in Sweden. While the principal distinctions between these methods are well known, less notice has been given to a number of other differences that have emerged as n...

This paper compares the implementation of the two economic evaluation methods Cost-Effectiveness/Utility (CEA/CUA) and Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) as tools for allocation of national public funds in the health and transport sector in Sweden, respectively. We compare the recommended values for important economic parameters such as the social discount rate, the marginal cost of public funds, and ...

In the present paper we describe the structure of the Chinese health care system and sketch its future development. We analyse issues of provider incentives and the actual burden sharing between government, enterprises and people. We further aim to identify a number of current problems and link these to a discussion of future challenges in the form of an aging population, increased privatizatio...

This paper estimates the long-run effects of childhood Medicaid eligibility on adult health and economic outcomes using program’s original introduction ( 1966–1970) its mandated coverage welfare recipients. The design compares cohorts born in different years relative to implementation, states with preexisting welfare-based eligibility. Early reduces mortality disability, increases employment, r...

We study the effect of privatizing Medicaid drug benefits on prices and utilization. Drug spending would decrease by 21.3 percent if private insurers administered all benefits. One-third is driven insurers’ ability to negotiate with pharmacies. The remaining two-thirds greater use lower cost drugs, such as generics, only realized in states that give flexibility design Privatization does not red...

To investigate barriers to universal health insurance in developing countries, we designed a randomized experiment involving about 6,000 households Indonesia who are subject government program with weakly enforced mandate. Time-limited subsidies increased enrollment and attracted lower-cost enrollees, part by reducing the strategic timing of correspond needs. Registration assistance also enroll...