Prices for consultations with General Practitioners (GPs) in Australia are unregulated, and patients pay the difference between the price set by the GP and a fixed reimbursement from the national tax-funded Medicare insurance scheme. We construct a Vickrey-Salop model of GP price and quality...

Few papers examine the pecuniary and non-pecuniary determinants of doctors’ labour supply despite substantial predicted shortages in many OECD countries. We contribute to the literature by applying both a structural discrete choice and a reduced-form approach. Using detailed survey data for...

Non-pecuniary sources of motivation are a strong feature of the health care sector and the impact of competitive incentives may be lower where pecuniary motivation is low. We test this hypothesis by measuring the marginal utility of income of physicians from a stated-choice experiment, and...

Many countries use financial incentive programs to attract physicians to work in rural areas. This paper examines the effectiveness of a policy reform in Australia that made some locations newly eligible for financial incentives and increased incentives for locations already eligible. The...

We quantify competition in Australia's residential aged care sector and study how competition is associated with quality of care and prices in the sector. Competition is defined three ways: the number of competitors within a 10 km radius of a facility; the distance (in km) to the third closest...

A key policy issue in many countries is the maldistribution of doctors across geographic areas, which has important effects on equity of access and health care costs. Many government programs and incentive schemes have been established to encourage doctors to practise in rural areas. However,...

Many countries face a continuing shortage in nurses' labour supply. Previous research suggests that nurses respond only weakly to changes in wages. However, the decision to exit or enter the nursing profession has not been taken into account in previous studies, although the occupational choice...

A number of studies suggest there is an over-supply of specialists and an under-supply of GPs in many developed countries. Previous econometric studies of specialty choice from the US suggest that a number of factors play a role, including expected future earnings, educational debt, and having...

In the discrete choice experiment literature, it has been argued that the choice sets from which respondents choose should include an unforced choice because this is more realistic and accounts for status quo bias. However, we propose a much stronger set of arguments for preferring to use...

Consumption of sugar sweetened beverages exhibits strong associations with weight gain, obesity, and dental caries, especially in young children. The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of price changes on children's consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages. Using micro-level panel data...