We study the link between illness severity and the use of public health care services by the privately insured under a public health system. Our theoretical model shows that this relationship will depend on the prioritization established by the public health authorities, the cost of waiting and...

We show that children who are born at or just before the weekend are less likely to be breastfed, owing to poorer breastfeeding support services in hospitals at weekends. We use this variation to estimate the effect of breastfeeding on children’s development in the first five years of life,...

Narrow hospital networks have proliferated in health systems with managed care. We investigate the causal effect of network breadth on mortality leveraging the termination of the largest health insurer in Colombia. The termination caused a substantial increase in mortality accompanied by...

Balanced experimental designs, in which the number of treatment and control units are the same, do not maximize power subject to a cost constraint when treat-ment units are more expensive than control ones. Despite this, such balanced designs are the norm in economics. This paper describes...

The present paper outlines measures of disparity in healthcare access and health outcomes, drawing from the standardized metrics introduced in one related study (Bancalari et al., 2023). Beveridge countries seem to be less unequal than Bismarckian countries. Yet, there is no strong pattern in...

Health constitutes a fundamental aspect of our well-being. It is also a key factor in determining our contribution to market and non-market output. Health inequality refers to the unequal realization of health outcomes between different groups in the population. Systematic disparities in health...