The Rise of Health EconomicsHow a Discipline is Transforming Economic Research

30 September 2025

A recent study, co-authored by HCHE member Prof. Dr. Mathias Kifmann (with Lorenz Gschwent and Martin Karlsson, University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, and Björn Hammarfelt, University of Borås in Sweden), examines the evolving role of health economics within the field of economics. Over the past 30 years, health economics has gained increasing importance, which is also reflected in a significant rise in the share of health economics articles published in leading academic journals.

The analysis identifies two distinct waves in the “quality” of health economics research, each driven by different factors. Publications from 2007 to 2009 were primarily characterized by “impact,” with a focus on studies examining the effects of early childhood influences on health. Later, the field was marked by “novelty,” emphasizing the effects of financing mechanisms for healthcare services. The wave from 2014 to 2016 was triggered by high-impact research on behavioral responses to financial incentives in health insurance systems and the application of new empirical methods.

Furthermore, Kifmann and his co-authors found a strong positive correlation between citation counts and quality assessments. However, compared to other areas of economics, health economics articles receive fewer citations relative to their assessed quality. Pandemic-related research in 2020 and 2021 received a high number of citations, though the findings suggest that these studies were not systematically more novel or impactful than earlier work within the same subfield.

The full study can be found here.