In recent years the National Health Service (NHS) in Britain has experienced an acute shortage of qualified nurses. This has placed issues of recruitment and retention in the profession high on the political agenda. In this paper we investigate the determinants of job satisfaction for nurses,...

We performed a cross-sectional, "bottom-up" observational study of resource consumption and quality of life of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) in the United Kingdom. Three centers participated in the study. Patients received a questionnaire either by mail or during a clinic visit, and a...

We performed a cross-sectional, "bottom-up" observational study of resource consumption and quality of life of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) in Germany. Six centers participated in the study. Patients were asked to complete a questionnaire, and a total of 737 patients returned the...

One of the main features of health insurance is moral hazard, as defined by Pauly (1968); people face incentives for excess utilization of medical care since they do not pay the full marginal cost for provision. To mitigate the moral hazard problem, a coinsurance can be included in the insurance...

The paper evaluates the German health care reform of 1997, using the individual number of doctor visits as outcome measure. A new econometric model, the Probit-Poisson-log-normal model with correlated errors, describes the data better than existing count data models. Moreover, it has an...

Dieser Aufsatz diskutiert alternative Anreizmechanismen für pharmazeutische Innovationen zur Bewältigung globaler Gesundheitsprobleme. Patent Buyouts, bei denen ein öffentlicher Fonds einen Aufschlag auf den durch ein Auktionsverfahren ermittelten privaten Wert zahlt, würden die Effizienz...

The goal of this paper is to analyze short term-absences from work (i.e., periods of seven days or less) in Sweden during a period with two different reforms. As a theoretical model, we use a utility-maximization framework with two restrictions (time and budget constraints). Using multiple spell...

This paper examines the relationship between labor productivity and alcohol consumption based on research conducted with a limited sample of workers who drink alcohol. Estimation results show that in the case of males, the amount of alcohol consumed significantly raises labor productivity, with...

The German health care reform of 1997 provides a natural experiment for evaluating the price sensitivity of demand for physicians' services. As a part of the reform, co-payments for prescription drugs were increased step up to 200%. However, certain groups of people were exempted from the...

This paper reports on a re-evaluation of the German health care reform of 1997. A previous evaluation found a limited effect of a 4.4 percent reduction of the number of doctor visits in a sample of pharmacy customers. The re-evaluation based on a representative household survey, the German...