This proposal involves the establishment of ‘welfare accounts’ for every person in a country. There are four accounts: a retirement account (covering pensions), an unemployment account (covering unemployment support), a human capital account (covering education and training), and a health...

Under Medicare Part D, senior citizens choose prescription drug insurance offred by numerous private insurers. We examine non-poor enrollees' actions in 2006 and 2007 using panel data. Our sample reduced overspending by $298 on average, with gains by 81% of them. The greatest improvements were...

Health expenditures as a share of GDP have more than tripled over the last half century. A common conjecture is that this is primarily a consequence of rising real per capita income, which more than doubled over the same period. We investigate this hypothesis empirically by instrumenting for...

In the case of natural monopolies there tends to be a trade-off between a higher quality of output provided by private firms, and a better access for poor consumers provided by public firms. This is partly the reflection of differences in objectives by private and public firms. The former tend...

This paper investigates the average effects of (firm-provided) workplace health promotion measures in form of the analysis of sickness absenteeism and health circles/courses on labour market out¬comes of the firms’ employees. Exploiting linked employer-employee panel data that consist of rich...

This paper analyses differences in welfare utilization between immigrants and natives in Sweden using a large panel data set, LINDA, for the years 1990 to 1996. Both welfare expenditures and immigration increased substantially in Sweden in the 1990's. We find that immigrants use welfare to a...

This Paper analyses transitions into and out of three different labour market states: social assistance, unemployment and employment. We estimate a dynamic multinomial logit model, controlling for endogenous initial conditions and unobserved heterogeneity, using a large representative Swedish...

Extending choice in health care is currently popular amongst English, and other, politicians. Those promoting choice make an appeal to a simple economic argument. Competitive pressure helps make private firms more efficient and consumer choice acts as a major driver for efficiency. Giving...

The determinants of the dramatically rising expenditures on health care in general, and on hospital care in particular, have been of prior concern to policy and to research. Using a rich panel data set this paper contributes to this literature by investigating factors determining the demand for...

One of the mechanisms that is implemented in the cost containment wave in the health-care sectors in western countries is the definition, by the third-party payer, of a set of preferred providers. The insured patients have different access rules to such providers when ill. The rules specify the...