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What Drives Individual Health Expenditure in Switzerland?

Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics volume 144, pages 337–358 (2008)Cite this article

Summary

The explanatory factors of individual healthcare consumption are studied by means of healthcare expenditures from the 2000–2005 Swiss Household Income and Expenditure Survey (SHIES). In order to tackle the issues of large number of null expenditures and skewed distribution of positive outcomes, the family of Box-Cox censoring models (Chaze, 2005) is applied. The results show that the use of SHIES data makes it possible to reveal many important factors of individual healthcare consumption, and that the role played by healthcare supply density variables is consistent with the theory of induced demand.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Econometrics and Laboratory of Applied Economics, University of Geneva, bd Pont d’Arve 40, 1211, Geneva 4, Switzerland

    Marcel Bilger & Jean-Paul Chaze

Authors
  1. Marcel Bilger
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  2. Jean-Paul Chaze
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Correspondence to Marcel Bilger.

Additional information

This paper derives from the joint IRIS research program of the universities of Geneva and Lausanne and the federal polytechnic school of Lausanne. The program is funded by the CUS and by said institutions.

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Bilger, M., Chaze, JP. What Drives Individual Health Expenditure in Switzerland?. Swiss J Economics Statistics 144, 337–358 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03399258

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