Economic and Social Research Institute

About: Economic and Social Research Institute is a nonprofit organization based out in Dublin, Ireland. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & European union. The organization has 425 authors who have published 1530 publications receiving 41567 citations.

Paying for hospital care: the experience with implementing activity-based funding in five European countries.

Abstract: Following the US experience, activity-based funding has become the most common mechanism for reimbursing hospitals in Europe. Focusing on five European countries (England, Finland, France, Germany and Ireland), this paper reviews the motivation for introducing activity-based funding, together with the empirical evidence available to assess the impact of implementation. Despite differences in the prevailing approaches to reimbursement, the five countries shared several common objectives, albeit with different emphasis, in moving to activity-based funding during the 1990s and 2000s. These include increasing efficiency, improving quality of care and enhancing transparency. There is substantial cross-country variation in how activity-based funding has been implemented and developed. In Finland and Ireland, for instance, activity-based funding is principally used to determine hospital budgets, whereas the models adopted in the other three countries are more similar to the US approach. Assessing the impact of activity-based funding is complicated by a shortage of rigorous empirical evaluations. What evidence is currently available, though, suggests that the introduction of activity-based funding has been associated with an increase in activity, a decline in length of stay and/or a reduction in the rate of growth in hospital expenditure in most of the countries under consideration.

Assessing the Incidence and Wage Effects of Overskilling in the Australian Labour Market

Abstract: This paper examines the incidence and wage effects of overskilling in Australia. It finds that approximately 30 per cent of employees believed themselves to be moderately overskilled and 11 per cent believed themselves to be severely overskilled. The incidence of skills mismatch varied little when the sample was split by education. After controlling for individual and job characteristics as well as the potential bias arising from individual unobserved heterogeneity, severely overskilled workers suffer an average wage penalty of 10.2 per cent with the penalty ranging from about 6 per cent among vocationally qualified employees to just less than 20 per cent for graduates.

GP reimbursement and visiting behaviour in Ireland

Abstract: In Ireland, approximately 30% of the population receive free GP services (medical card patients) while the remainder (private patients) must pay for each visit. In 1989, the manner in which GPs were reimbursed by the State for their medical card patients was changed from fee-for-service to capitation while private patients continued to pay on a fee-for-service basis. Concerns about supplier-induced demand were in part responsible for this policy change. The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which the utilisation of GP services is influenced by the reimbursement system facing GPs, by comparing visiting rates for the two groups before and after this change. Using a difference-in-differences approach on pooled micro-data from 1987, 1995 and 2000, we find that medical card eligibility has a consistently positive and significant effect on the utilisation of GP services. However, the differential in visiting rates between medical card patients and others did not narrow between 1987 and 1995 or 2000, as might have been anticipated if supplier-induced demand played a major role prior to the change in reimbursement system.