This paper explores the changing role of government involvement in health care financing policy outside the United States. It provides a review of the economics literature in this area to elucidate the implications of recent policy changes on efficiency, costs, and quality. Our review reveals...

How does fiscal decentralisation affect the development of a health system? Evidence from health care decentralisation in Europe can offer some insights to the question above. This paper addresses the effects of health care decentralisation in Europe, and reviews some of the key questions on the...

This paper investigates the effects of local smoking bans on different outcomes using county and time variation over the last 20 years in the US. First, I find no evidence that local smoking bans in bars, restaurants and workplaces decrease the prevalence of smoking. The estimates are very small...

Assessing the value of new medical technologies may require new approaches that take into account a more comprehensive set of parameters than the incremental cost/QALY. It is argued that MCDA can fulfil this role and has the potential to be methodologically superior to the currently used...

This paper investigates the determinants of the prices of branded prescription medicines across different regulatory settings and health care systems, taking into account their launch date, patent status, market dynamics and the regulatory context in which they diffuse. By using volume-weighted...

The impacts of choice in public services are controversial. We exploit a reform in the English National Health Service to assess the impact of relaxing constraints on patient choice. We estimate a demand model to evaluate whether increased choice increased demand elasticity faced by hospitals...

The latest CEP Election Analysis, published jointly with LSE Health, gives an overview of the research evidence on UK healthcare, one of the key battlegrounds of the 2010 General Election.

Prophylactic vaccines for human papillomavirus (HPV) are being introduced in many countries for the prevention of cervical cancer, the second most important cause of cancer-related death in women globally. This is likely to have a significant impact on the future burden of cervical cancer,...

Recently attention has begun to focus not only on assessing the effectiveness of interventions to tackle mental health problems, but also on measures to prevent physical co-morbidity. Individuals with mental health problems are at significantly increased risk of chronic physical health problems,...

Improving accountability in public services has been a central objective of many public sector reforms in recent years. Chief among these have been efforts to generate observable performance measures as a basis for monitoring performance. This paper examines a natural experiment in regimes...