Cost-effectiveness analysis is versatile and used widely to assist in health care decision making. This chapter discusses how cost-effectiveness analysis is used at the system or national level, particularly in the domain of coverage and payment policy. We describe its relationship to other...

Structural economic models allow one to analyze counterfactuals when economic systems change and to evaluate the well-being of economic agents. A key element in such analysis is the ability to identify the primitive functions and distributions of the economic models that are employed to describe...

Spatial inequality in global economic development has left Africa with the least progress in improving living standards among developing regions of the world. Moreover, there are strong neighborhood effects within Africa. This paper revisits the explanation of unequal growth across countries in...

This chapter presents a unified set of estimation methods for fitting a rich array of models describing dynamic relationships within a longitudinal data setting. The discussion surveys approaches for characterizing the micro dynamics of continuous dependent variables both over time and across...

Quadrant dependence is a useful dependence notion of two random variables, widely applied in reliability, insurance and actuarial sciences. The interest in this dependence structure ranges from modeling it, throughout measuring its strength and investigations on how increasing the dependence...

It is standard practice in empirical work to allow for clustering in the error covariance matrix if the explanatory variables of interest vary at a more aggregate level than the units of observation. Often, however, the structure of the error covariance matrix is more complex, with correlations...

Three concepts: stochastic discount factors, multi-beta pricing and mean-variance efficiency, are at the core of modern empirical asset pricing. This chapter reviews these paradigms and the relations among them, concentrating on conditional asset-pricing models where lagged variables serve as...

In the Netherlands cannabis use is quasi-legalized. Small quantities of cannabis can be bought in cannabis-shops. We investigate how the distance to the nearest cannabis-shop affects the age of onset of cannabis use. We use a Mixed Proportional Hazard rate framework to take account of observable...