There is a well-established debate between Heckman sample selection and two-part models in health econometrics, particularly when no obvious exclusion restrictions are available. Most of this debate has focussed on the application of these models to health care expenditure. This paper revisits...

The General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) is frequently used as a measure of mental well-being with those people with values below a certain threshold regarded as suffering from mental stress. Comparison of mental stress levels across populations may then be sensitive to the chosen threshold. This...

When measuring health inequality using ordinal data, analysts typically must choose between indices specifically based upon ordinal data and more standard indices using ordinal data, which has been transformed into cardinal data. This paper compares inequality rankings across a number of...

This paper examines the conjecture that tax reform recommendations are not as sensitive to underlying consumer demand systems as are derived optimal tax rates. Tax reform recommendations for Ireland using the Ahmad-Stern model of indirect tax reform with different underlying consumer demand...

This article uses duration analysis to investigate the role of tobacco taxes in starting and quitting smoking. Applying a variety of parametric duration models to a sample of Irish women, it finds that in general tobacco taxes do influence starting and quitting smoking in the expected direction....