In den vergangenen Jahren hat die Wissenschaft ihre Aufmerksamkeit verstärkt auf das Thema der individuellen Gesundheitskompetenz gerichtet - und gezeigt, dass große Teile der deutschen Bevölkerung eine geringe Gesundheitskompetenz aufweisen. Informationen und Angebote rund um Gesundheit sind...

This paper provides the first quantitative economic models of pharmacy benefit management regulation. The price-theoretic models allow for various market frictions and imperfections including market power, coordination costs, tax distortions, and incomplete innovation incentives. A rigorous...

Recent policy proposals seek to regulate out-of-network hospital prices. We study how such regulation affects equilibrium prices, network formation, and hospital exit. We estimate a structural model of insurer-hospital bargaining that allows for out-of-network transactions between...

Without the opioid epidemic, American life expectancy would not have declined prior to 2020. In turn, the epidemic was sparked by the development and marketing of a new generation of prescription opioids and provider behavior is still helping to drive it. There is little relationship between the...

Many centralized assignment systems seek to not only provide good matches for participants' current needs, but also to accommodate changes in preferences and circumstances. We study the problem of designing a dynamic reassignment mechanism in the context of Norway's system for allocating...

This study examines "tunneling" practices through which health care providers covertly extract profit by making inflated payments for goods and services to commonly-owned related parties. While incentives to tunnel exist across sectors, health care providers may find it uniquely advantageous to...

We measure the impacts of vertical integration between insurers and hospitals. In the Chilean market, where half of private hospital capacity is vertically integrated, integration increases inpatient care spending by 6 percent and decreases consumer surplus and total welfare. Integrated insurers...

Private equity (PE) plays an increasingly important role in the modern US economy. However, its impacts on owned-firms are incompletely understood. We exploit a historically large leveraged buyout of a national hospital chain to examine how the full life cycle of PE influences hospital-level...

A recent approach to testing for customer statistical discrimination involves studying price gaps between sellers from different gender, race, or ethnic groups and how they evolve as buyers obtain more information about seller quality. We consider a similar setting, testing for statistical...

Medical provider price transparency is often touted as a way to lower health care spending. But the impact of price transparency is theoretically ambiguous: it could lower health care spending via increased consumer price shopping or improved insurer bargaining but could also raise health care...

We analyze the economic consequences of rising health care prices in the US. Using exposure to price increases caused by horizontal hospital mergers as an instrument, we show that rising prices raise the cost of labor by increasing employer-sponsored health insurance premiums. A 1% increase in...

Innovation policy often involves an uncomfortable trade-off between rewarding innovators sufficiently and providing the innovation at the lowest possible price. However, in health care markets with insurance for innovative goods, society may be able to ensure efficient rewards for inventors and...

We examine the impacts of physician-hospital integration on care fragmentation and other measures of care-coordination using a dynamic model of movers and stayers in commercially insured plans. Although recent growth in the share of practicing physicians belonging to these vertical organizations...

This paper examines the tradeoffs of monitoring for wasteful public spending. By penalizing unnecessary spending, monitoring improves the quality of public expenditure and incentivizes firms to invest in compliance technology. I study a large Medicare program that monitored for unnecessary...

Health care costs in the United States are much higher than in other countries. These cost differences can be explained in part by a lack of competition in the United States. Some markets, such as pharmaceuticals and medical equipment, have elements of monopoly. Other markets, such as health...

This paper provides the first quantitative economic models of pharmacy benefit management regulation. The price-theoretic models allow for various market frictions and imperfections including market power, coordination costs, tax distortions, and incomplete innovation incentives. A rigorous...

"Health policymaking has become increasingly contentious over recent decades. The editors observe that legislators in the coming years will need to address Medicare and its increasing share of the federal budget. Against this backdrop they offer a collection of highly regarded experts to weigh...

Between 2000 and 2020, the share of US hospital bed capacity under multi-unit firms (systems) increased from 58% to 81% - a rapid corporatization of a sector with $1.3 trillion in annual spend. However, little is known about how system ownership affects hospital profitability and quality. We...

This paper investigates the impact of monitoring institutions on market outcomes in health care. Health care markets are characterized by asymmetric information. Physicians have an information advantage over patients with respect to the appropriate treatment for the patient and may exploit this...

This paper develops a model of the nursing home industry to investigate the quality effects of policies that either raise regulated reimbursement rates or increase local competition. Using data from Pennsylvania, I estimate the parameters of the model. The findings indicate that nursing homes...

Vast organ shortages motivated recent efforts to increase the supply of transplantable organs, but we know little about the demand side of the market. We test the implications of a model of organ demand using the universe of U.S. transplant data from 1987 to 2013. Exploiting variation in supply...

I assess the extent to which the gender gap in physician earnings may be driven by physicians' preference for referring to specialists of the same gender. Analyzing administrative data on 100 million Medicare patient referrals, I provide robust evidence that doctors refer more to specialists of...

This paper investigates the impact of monitoring institutions on market outcomes in health care. Health care markets are characterized by asymmetric information. Physicians have an information advantage over patients with respect to the appropriate treatment for the patient and may exploit this...

The landscape of the U.S. healthcare industry is changing dramatically as healthcare providers expand both within and across markets. While federal antitrust agencies have mounted several challenges to same-market combinations, they have not challenged any non-horizontal affiliations - including...

Retail clinics are an innovation that has the potential to improve competition in health care markets. We use the universe of emergency room (ER) visits in New Jersey from 2006-2014 to examine the impact of retail clinics on ER usage. We find significant effects of retail clinics on ER visits...

Without the opioid epidemic, American life expectancy would not have declined prior to 2020. In turn, the epidemic was sparked by the development and marketing of a new generation of prescription opioids and provider behavior is still helping to drive it. There is little relationship between the...

This article analyzes the shifts of power relation and influence between pharmaceutical industry (producers), pharmacies, and social health insurers (SHI) in Germany based on drug prices. Since the health care reform of 2004, these interest groups have negotiated fees and discounts among each...

Det är kris både i förlossningsvården och i vården av äldre. Vi ser dagligen reportage om hur patienter vårdas i korridorer på de stora sjukhusen. Politiker gör blixtutryckningar och satsar mer resurser men problemen kvarstår

"The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the world's vulnerabilities to health and economic ruin from disease outbreaks. But the pandemic merely reveals fundamental weaknesses and contradictions in global health. What are the roots of discontents in global health? How do geo-politics, power...

"Problems related to the functioning of public healthcare systems encourage the search for alternative solutions, for example to ensure improved access to medical services. However, these proposals also require appropriate theoretical support to better present and apply them. This book draws on...

"The core thesis of this book is that the major economic issues of renewable energy, housing, health and income disparities could best be addressed through direct government "in kind" production and redistributive measures. It is argued that this governmental "in kind" production of essential...

Financial Management in Context -- Organization of Financial Management -- Financial Analysis and Management Reporting -- Tax Status of Healthcare Oganizations -- Third-Party Payment -- Medicare -- Medicaid -- Cost Accounting -- Reimbursement -- Managing Working Capital -- Managing Revenue Cycle...