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 latest years there has been a growing interest on factors explaining health expenditure at a regional level. Indeed, in the case of Italy, even though the health care system was initially designed as a centralized one, the government has progressively undertaken a decentralization process up to the point of modifying the Constitution in order to appoint regions with exclusive health care res...

I examine the joint determination of health plan choice and subsequent health care utilization in the Medicare managed care and supplemental insurance markets. The objectives are to evaluate the welfare impact of the Medicare managed care program taking into account the effect of endogenous selection, and to advance the applied literature on health plan choice and health care demand. Standard m...

The study analyses the combined influence of obesity and lifestyle behaviors on health care utilization and health care costs. Therefore I analyze the interaction of obesity, nutrition and physical activity based on a community level dataset from a German city. In addition to the expected convex effects of age and chronic diseases for utilization, the results indicate that BMI and physical inac...

Social Insurance with Competitive Insurance Markets and Risk Misperception* This paper considers an economy where individuals differ in productivity and in risk. Rochet (1991) has shown that when private insurance markets offer full coverage at fair rates, social insurance is desirable if and only if risk and productivity are negatively correlated. This condition is usually shown to be satisfie...

This paper examines the implications of minimum standards for insurance markets. I study the imposition of binding minimum standards on the market for voluntary private health insurance for the elderly. The central estimates suggest that the introduction of the standards was associated with an 8 percentage point (25%) decrease in the proportion of the population with coverage in the affected ma...

The paper presents the results from a CGE model of interactions between public and private health care, outputs of non-health goods and national welfare in a small open economy applied to the UK. The effects on welfare of higher provision come through direct gains, affecting the well-being of households, and indirectly, through increases in the effective (i.e. ‘able to work’) endowments of skil...

This paper analyses the socioeconomic determinants of life expectancy in Southeastern Europe countries highlighting most important factors that can affect this part Europe. 
 Two Panel Data Regression with fixed–effects model was applied for 20 years from 2000 to 2019. Eight and environmental explanatory variables were used verify their influence on expectancy.
 The analysis highlight...