EcoEchoes

This episode’s guest is Pieter van Baal, Professor of Public Health Economics at the Erasmus School of Health Policy & Management and head of the Health Economics department. The conversation explores pharmaceutical pricing, patents, and innovation incentives, discussing why healthcare systems negotiate medicine prices and whether the current model for developing innovative medicines is functi...

This episode’s guest is Frédérique Franken, a PhD candidate at the Erasmus School of Health Policy & Management (ESHPM). She discusses her research on the environmental sustainability of healthcare, focusing on the role of insurer–provider contract negotiations in driving greener practices. The conversation explores how healthcare systems contribute to climate change, the Dutch policy context...

This episode’s guest is Elisa de Weerd, a PhD candidate in Health Economics at the Erasmus School of Economics and incoming postdoctoral researcher at Radboud University. She discusses her research on employment and earnings dynamics before and after transgender transitioning using Dutch administrative data. The conversation explores how large-scale administrative datasets can help study labor mar...

This episode features Johannes Cordier, a visiting PhD student from the University of St. Gallen at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Johannes discusses two papers using Swiss hospital administrative data. The first examines how machine learning methods can identify under-reported sepsis cases, shedding light on how coding practices and reimbursement incentives affect data quality. The second studies...

This episode’s guest is Sanna Azzouz, PhD candidate in Health Technology Assessment at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She discusses her paper "Cost-effectiveness analysis of image-guided ablation versus conventional ablation in patients with recurrent ventricular tachycardia in France: results from the inEurHeart trial". The conversation covers how ventricular tachycardia develops after myocardial...

In this episode, Stefan Lipman, Assistant Professor at Erasmus School of Health Policy & Management (Erasmus University Rotterdam), discusses with us how financial incentives can be used to promote healthy behaviour. The conversation covers incentive design (carrots vs. sticks), ethical and equity considerations, funding and cost-effectiveness, the role of structural determinants of health, an...

In this episode, we have a casual chat about Prithvi’s experience attending and presenting at the International Long-Term Care Policy Network (ILPN) 2024 Conference in Bilbao. We talk about what the conference was like, from the city to the general vibe, and what it’s like to present research to a mixed audience. More broadly, we chat about navigating big conferences solo, tips for meeting people...

In this episode of EcoEchoes, we speak with Professor Job van Exel, a health economist, director of research at ESHPM, and the original founder of this podcast. We discuss the challenges in defining and measuring informal caregiving, especially for incorporating it into economic evaluations and then to further down the line inform policy. For example, we talk about the distinctions between objecti...

This episode’s guest is Danae Arroyos-Calvera, Associate Professor in Behavioural and Experimental Economics at the University of Birmingham. She discusses her research on cooperation, moral wiggle room, and plausible deniability in public goods games. The conversation explores the challenge of translating lab findings to policy, the importance of publishing null results, and the balance between i...

In this episode, Yubraj Acharya discusses his paper ‘Reducing Non-Prescription Antibiotics Use through Community Education in Low-Income Countries’. He sheds light on the growing issue of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and shares about the intervention he conducted in Nepal, aimed at reducing non-prescribed antibiotic use among parents of children. Guest: Yubraj Acharya, Associate Professor of Hea...

In this episode, Judith Bom and Gaia Bagnasco discuss their latest paper mapping care pathways for people in their last 6 years before death with dementia in the Netherlands. You can find the paper here . First, we talk about why studying ageing and dementia matters and how the Dutch long-term care system works. We then move on to discuss what their latent class analysis reveals about three distin...

This episode’s guest is Anna Stirner, a PhD Candidate in Health Economics at the University of Cologne. She discusses her experimental study on physicians’ use of therapeutic decision support (DS) systems in pediatric antibiotic prescribing, examining how access, effort costs, and quality incentives shape uptake and care quality. The conversation explores the challenge of antibiotic overprescripti...

Episode Description This episode’s guest is Vahid, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Erasmus School of Economics. His work is focused on the intersection between labor and health economics. In this episode, he presents his working paper on childhood mental health effects of early life exposure to paternal job loss. The discussion sheds light on a critical aspect of job loss and how this scenario ca...

This episode’s guest is Professor Hans van Kippersluis from Erasmus School of Economics. He discusses his working paper “Skipping your workout, again? Measuring and understanding time inconsistency in physical activity”, co-authored with Diarmaid Ó Ceallaigh and Kirsten Rohde. The paper studies time inconsistency in physical activity using survey data from the Dutch Lifelines cohort. They find tha...

This episode’s guest is Amal Ahmad, an Assistent Professor at the Development Economics group at Wageningen University. She presents her working paper on the effect of early mother's marriage on child growth in India. The authors explore this causal relationship using age at menarche as an instrumental variable. The conversation discusses the data and methods used, as well as policy implications a...

This episode's guest is Michael Haylock , a health economist now working in consulting after a postdoc at the University of Duisburg-Essen. He presents his paper “Improving the availability of stem cell donors,  a letter and email intervention” which looks at the effects of a behavioural intervention to reduce attrition among registered donors. We talk about the importance and logistics of stem ce...

This episode’s guest is Benjamin Chibuye, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Danish Centre for Health Economics (DaCHE) in Department of Public Health at the University of Southern Denmark. He presents his working paper on physician altruism and opioid prescribing, focusing on how Danish general practitioners respond to national guidelines in light of their professional motivations. The conversation...

This one is for the experimental economists. Fanny shares her experience attending the Economic Science Association’s European Meeting in Helsinki in September 2024. This was Fanny's first experience attending a non-health conference. Listen to find out why the conference is worth attending if you run experiments. The next European meeting will take place in Brno, Czech Republic from Wednesday 3 S...

In this episode we introduce our co-host Dyllis De Pessemier. She briefly introduces herself and shares her experience attending the 34th Alzheimer Europe Conference in Geneva. She presented her first project there, titled "The effect of a person with dementia's permanent nursing home admission on their partner's mental well-being". We also talk about our experiences attending conferences alone. ...

This episode's guest is Benoit Decerf, a Senior Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank, presenting his paper named "Attitudes on the trade-off between poverty and longevity". The discussion explores how mortality can be integrated into poverty measurement, the methodology used to estimate people's willingness to trade income for additional years of life, and the implications...

In our third conference review episode, Prithvi discusses with Fanny his experience attending two courses in Lucerne, Switzerland by the Swiss Society of Health Economics: one on Empirical Policy Evaluation and another on Machine Learning. The discussion covers expectations, course content, key takeaways, and practical applications of the methods learned. You can find the link to the Lucerne websi...

We got the chance to record an episode with Alexander Marin and to talk about his working paper "The Heterogeneous Risk and Dynamics of Out-of-Pocket Health Expenditures" where he uses machine learning (multivariate random forest) and time series models (ARMA) to analyse healthcare expenditure trends in the US. We talk about how health care spending and the persistence of elevated spending followi...

In the second conference review, Fanny talks to Prithvi about her experience at the Nordic Health Economists’ Study Group meeting which took place in August 2024 at the University of Eastern Finland in Kuopio, Finland.  You can find the link to the 2024 NHESG website here . If you would like to apply for NHESG conference at University of Oslo coming up in August 2025, you can do so using this link...

We had the pleasure to record an episode with  Amitabh Chandra.  We discuss his working paper "Productivity Differences in Fundamental Life-Sciences Discovery" co-authored with Connie Xu. The aim of the paper is to research whether a life scientist's university has an effect on their productivity. To answer this question, they first attempt to measure a scientist's productivity, and then use a mov...

This episode's guest is Orla Doyle, Professor at the School of Economics at University College Dublin and Director of the UCD Childhood and Human Development Research Center. We discuss her extensive experience, both in conducting research and valorizing its societal impact through policy. An excellent example is the 'Preparing For Life' - trial, an early childhood intervention, of which the age-1...