How Did the German Health Care Reform of 1997 Change the Distribution of the Demand for Health Services?

Rainer Winkelmann

No 314, SOI - Working Papers from Socioeconomic Institute - University of Zurich

Abstract: I consider the problem of evaluating the effect of a health care reform on the demand for doctor visits when the effect is potentially different in different parts of the outcome distribution. Quantile regression is a useful technique for studying such heterogeneous treatment effects. Recent progree has been made to extend such methods to applications with a count dependent variable. An analysis of a 1997 health care reform in Germany shows the benefit of the approach: lower quantiles, such as the 25 percent quantile, fell by substantially larger amounts than what would have been predicted based on Poisson or negative binomial models.

Keywords: heterogeneous treatment effect; count data; quantile regression; Poisson model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C25 I11 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20 pages
Date: 2003-12
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in Journal of Applied Econometrics 19, 2004, pages 455-472

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https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/52186/1/wp0314.pdf First version, 2003 (application/pdf)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:soz:wpaper:0314

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