Background: Economic theory strongly suggests that better information about the quality of care affects patients' choice of health service providers. However, we have little empirical evidence about the impact of information provided on provider's choice. There is, for example, no systematic...

Background: Recently, enormous efforts to measure the quality of health care have been made (i.e. AHRQ, OECD) in order to get information about ways to improve the quality of health care. However this area of research is still in an early stage of development and more research has to be done....

This paper shows that patients with private health insurance (PHI) are being offered significantly shorter waiting times than patients with statutory health insurance (SHI) in German acute hospital care. This behavior may be driven by the higher expected profitability of PHI relative to SHI...

Medical providers often have a significant influence on treatment decisions which they can use in their own financial interest. Classical models of supplier-induced demand predict that medical providers will supply fewer services if they face increasing prices. We test this prediction based on a...

Medical providers often have a significant influence on treatment decisions which they can use in their own financial interest. Classical models of supplier-induced demand predict that medical providers will supply fewer services if they face increasing prices. We test this prediction based on a...

This paper analyses the volume-outcome relationship and the effects of minimum volume regulations in the German hospital sector. We use a full sample of administrative data from the unselected, complete German hospital population for the years 2005 to 2007. We apply regression methods to analyze...