The general aim of this paper is to review how matching methods try to solve the evaluation problem – with a particular focus on propensity score matching – and their usefulness for the particular case of health programme evaluation. The “classical” case of matching estimation with a...

An increasing amount of empirical evidence suggests that patients with higher socioeconomic status wait less within publicly-funded hospitals to receive non-emergency (elective) surgery. Using data from Australia, we investigate the extent to which such gradient can be explained by sample...

This paper presents an overview of microsimulation as a method to evaluate health and health care policies and interventions. After presenting a brief survey of microsimulation models and applications we describe the main features of the approach and how these are implemented in practice. We pay...

The reduction of inequalities in health and in the access to health services is one of the main objectives in any health care system. Various studies have analysed the existence of inequalities in health and in the use of health care for the Spanish population. However, the empirical evidence...

Australia introduced an incentive payment scheme for general practitioners to ensure systematic and high quality care in chronic disease management. There is little empirical evidence and ambiguous theoretical guidance on which effects to expect on the quality of care. This paper evaluates the...

Instrumental variables methods (IV) are widely used in the health economics literature to adjust for hidden selection biases in observational studies when estimating treatment effects. Less attention has been paid in the applied literature to the proper use of instrumental variables if treatment...

Under the assumption of no unmeasured confounders, a large literature exists on methods that can be used to estimating average treatment effects (ATE) from observational data and that spans regression models, propensity score adjustments using stratification, weighting or regression and even the...

To prevent modern health conditions like obesity, cancer, cardiovascular illness, and diabetes, which have reached epidemic-like proportions in recent decades, many health experts argue that students should receive Health Education (HED) at school. Although this type of education aims mainly to...

The American program of folic acid fortification is generally thought to have increased the average amount of serum folate in the population and, hence, widely considered as a successful public health intervention. We use several waves of the “National Health and Nutrition Examination...