We conduct a quasi-Monte Carlo comparison of the recent developments in parametric and semi-parametric regression methods for healthcare costs against each other and against standard practice. The population of English NHS hospital inpatient episodes for the nancial year 2007-2008 (summed for...

Understanding the data generating process behind healthcare costs remains a key empirical issue. Although much research to date has focused on the prediction of the conditional mean cost, this can potentially miss important features of the full conditional distribution such as tail...

This paper develops and estimates a model that integrates two fundamental theories of individual health behavior: the Becker-Murphy model of rational addiction and the Grossman model of health investment. We define an individual's lifetime smoking consumption pattern and investments in health...

This lecture is about how best to evaluate economic theories in macroeconomics and finance, and the lessons that can be learned from the past use and misuse of evidence. It is argued that all macro/finance models are ‘false’ so should not be judged solely on the realism of their...

When the treatment under evaluation is continuous rather than binary, the marginal causal effect can be reported from the estimated dose-response function. Here, regression methods can be employed that specify a model for the endpoint, given the treatment and covariates. An alternative is to...

This paper extends the literature on modelling healthcare cost data by applying the Generalised Beta of the Second Kind (GB2) distribution to UK data. A quasi-experimental design, estimating models on a subset of the data and evaluating performance on another subset, is used to compare this...

This study decomposes differences in saliva log cotinine between children/adolescents from low and high socioeconomic backgrounds using the 1997/98 cross-section of the Health Survey for England (HSE). Three decomposition methods are applied including a mean-based (Oaxaca-Blinder) decomposition...

This paper introduces a new approach to measuring the association between health and socioeconomic status. Measuring inequalities in health is difficult when health is measured qualitatively, specifically on an ordinal scale. This paper demonstrates a rank-based dependence measure - the copula -...

This paper considers the simultaneous explanation of mortality risk, health and lifestyles, using a reduced-form system of equations in which the multivariate distribution is defined by the copula. A copula approximation of the joint distribution allows one to avoid usually implicit...

A copula is best described, as in Joe (1997), as a multivariate distribution function that is used to bind each marginal distribution function to form the joint. The copula parameterises the dependence between the margins, while the parameters of each marginal distribution function can be...