We take advantage of a natural experiment to provide new, credible evidence on the health consequences of scheduling births early for non-medical reasons. In May 2010, the Spanish government announced that a 2,500-euro universal “baby bonus” would stop being paid to babies born after...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the explanatory factors affecting introductory prices of new pharmaceuticals in a heavily regulated and highly subsidized market. We collect a data set consisting of all new chemical entities launched in Spain between 1997 and 2005, and model launching...

This paper studies oligopolistic competition in off-patent pharmaceutical markets using a vertical product differentiation model. This model can explain the observation that countries with stronger regulations have smaller generic market shares. It can also explain the differences in observed...

We study the effect of the cycle on the health of newborn babies using 30 years of birth-certificate data for Spain. We find that babies are born healthier when the local unemployment rate is high. Although fertility is lower during recessions, the effect on health is not the result of...

This paper analyses the effect of unmet formal care needs on informal caregiving hours in Spain using the two waves of the Informal Support Survey (1994, 2004). Testing for double sample selection from formal care receipt and the emergence of unmet needs provides evidence that the omission of...

We provide new cross-country evidence on smoking persistence in Europe, which can be due to both true state dependence and individual unobserved heterogeneity. We distinguish between the two by using semi-parametric panel data selection methods, applied to both the smoking participation and the...

This paper examines applications of non-expected utility in the health domain. The most widely used utility model in health economics, the time-linear QALY model, assumes (i) separability of quality of life and life duration, and (ii) linearity of the utility for life duration. We perform new...

This paper uses sequential stochastic dominance procedures to compare the joint distribution of health and income across space and time. It is the first application of which we are aware of methods to compare multidimensional distributions of income and health using procedures that are robust to...

In this paper we attempt to describe the general picture reasons behind the world population explosion during the 20th century. In general we comment that if, according to some, at the end of the 20th century there were too many people, this was has a consequence of scientific innovation,...

This paper studies price determination in pharmaceutical markets using data for 25 countries, six years and a comprehensive list of products from the MIDAS IMS database. We show that market power and the quality of the product has a significantly positive impact of prices. The nationality of the...