This study exploits a natural experiment in Italy to estimate how the demand for pharmaceuticals responds to variations in co-payment levels. After a period where co-payments were set to zero by a national law, the decision over co-payments was devolved to the Italian regions. While some regions...

Waiting times for specialist consultation and non-emergency surgery are often considered an equitable rationing mechanism in the public healthcare sector, because access to care is not based on socioeconomic status. This study tests empirically this claim using data from the Survey of Health,...

Waiting-time targets are used by policy makers to monitor providers' performance. Such targets are based on the distribution of the patients on the list. We compare and link such distribution with the distribution of waiting time of patients treated, as opposed to on the list, which is a better...

Using a sample of 137 hospitals over the period 1998-2002 in the English National Health Service, we estimate the elasticity of hospital costs with respect to waiting times. Our cross-sectional and panel-data results suggest that at the sample mean (103 days), waiting times have no significant...

"Performance indicators are increasingly used to regulate quality in health care and the public sector. We develop a model of contracting between a purchaser and a provider under the following assumptions: (a) providers have private information about their own ability and (b) they can engage in...

We present a model of contracting between a purchaser of health services and a provider (a hospital). We assume that hospitals provide two alternative treatments for a given diagnosis: a less intensive one (for example a medical treatment) and a more intensive one (surgical treatment). We assume...

Waiting times are commonly used in the health sector to ration demand. We show that when money charges (coinsurance rates) are optimally set and there are no redistributional considerations, it is never optimal to have a positive waiting time if the marginal cost of waiting is higher for...

The English National Health Service was established in 1948, and has therefore yielded some long time series data on health system performance. Waiting times for inpatient care have been a persistent cause of policy concern since the creation of the NHS. This paper develops a theoretical model...

We investigate the effect of competition on quality in regulated markets (e.g., health care, higher education, public utilities) taking a di¤erential game approach, in which quality is a stock variable. Using a Hotelling framework, we derive the open-loop solution (providers commit to an...

Waiting-time targets are frequently used by policy makers in the healthcare sector to monitor providers' performance. Such targets are based on the distribution of the patients on the list. We compare and link such distribution with the distribution of waiting time of the patients treated, as...