Clubs are typically experience goods. Potential members cannot ascertain precisely beforehand their quality (dependent endogenously on the club's facility investment and number of users, itself dependent on its pricing policy). Members with unsatisfactory initial experiences discontinue visits....

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...

This paper compares the small-sample properties of several asymp- totically equivalent tests for heteroscedasticity in the conditional logit model. While no test outperforms the others in all of the experiments conducted, the likelihood ratio test and a particular variety of theWald test are...

This paper investigates gender differences in smoking behavior using data from the German Socio-economic Panel (SOEP). We develop a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition method for count data models which allows to isolate the part of the gender differential in the number of cigarettes daily smoked that...

Using individual patient level hospital utilisation data for 2003, we examine the decisions of Dutch patients to bypass the nearest hospital for orthopaedics and neurosurgery. During our sample period, health insurers did not steer patients to preferred hospitals and performance indicators were...

I analyze the decisions on undertaking breast screening by women aged 50-64 in the UK. I provide estimation results on the discounting of the potential future benefits of screening. I also analyze the education di¤erences in mammography decisions,and examine the underlying mechanism how...

Between 2008 and 2012 new outpatient service locations were established in Hungarian micro-regions, which had lacked outpatient capacities before. We exploit this quasiexperiment to estimate the effect of geographical accessibility on outpatient case numbers using both semi-aggregate and...

We consider how individuals' decisions on their health behaviours depend on the level of investment in their health provided by the State. We develop the model provided by Ehrlich and Becker (1972) and Peltzman (1975) and we show that higher levels of protection provided by the State (either...

This paper proposes a new method of measuring obesity using Body Mass Index (BMI) data. Conventional measures which simply count the number of individuals with BMI in excess of an upper limit ignore the extent by which individuals exceed BMI limits and also the increased risk ratios for various...