Tor Helge Holmås

1 Introduction A recent health economics literature, surveyed in (Landi, Ivaldi, and Testi 2018; Siciliani 2016), has shown that there is a socioeconomic gradient in waiting times. These studies find that high socioeconomic status, measured by education or income level, is associated with lower waiting time for hospital admissions.

Abstract To keep elder employees in the labour force, introducing age‐dependent job conditions can be a policy measure. However, we know little about the effect of such initiatives. We investigate the effects of a particular programme in Norway that reduces the workload of teachers at age 55 but maintains the same wage. Evaluation of this programme is well suited to a difference‐in‐difference analysis, where the control group is teachers slightly too young to be eligible for the workload reduction.

This paper studies the relationship between patients' socio‐economic status and general practitioners' (GPs') service provision by exploiting administrative patient‐level data with information on consultation length, medical tests, and fee payments for each visit in Norway over a 5‐year period (2008–2012). To reduce patient heterogeneity, we limit the sample to a given condition, diabetes type II, that is treated almost exclusively in primary care.