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Seminar in Economics | with Tuomas Markkula

Department of Economics welcomes you to a seminar with Tuomas Markkula, Aalto University and Helsinki GSE.

Welcome to this seminar in economics organized by the Department of Economics, SSE. The seminar speaker is Tuomas Markkula, Aalto University and Helsinki GSE.

Abstract

In industries where private and public production coexist, public production can incentivize private competition and address distributional concerns. Using a structural model that incorporates affordable but capacity-constrained public health care producers into a framework with price-setting private producers and consumer demand, I examine how increasing public production's capacity affects waiting times, private practices' prices, and the distribution of consumer surplus. I estimate the model using consumer-level visit data on the Finnish dental care industry. In the counterfactual simulation, I increase the number of dentists in public practices by 20%. This reduces waiting times at public practices on average by 5%, or 1.5 days, but does not affect private practice prices as consumers do not switch from private to public practices. Consumer surplus increases, particularly for higher-income consumers, while the use of dental care services rises, especially among low-income consumers.

The seminar takes place at the Stockholm School of Economics, Bertil Ohlins gata 4.

Please contact Malin Skanelid if you have any questions.

Dept. of Economics Economics Seminar in economics