This article extends the theory of spatial competition by allowing firms to endogenously select their operating costs within a Hotelling (1929) framework. A three-stage duopoly model is examined in which the firms compete in cost reduction, locations and finally prices. Furthermore, it is...

Despite the growing prominence of theoretical analysis of inequality of opportunity over the past twenty years, empirical work towards the normative evaluation of real-world policies has been minimal. This paper seeks to address this issue. It proposes a normative framework to model the...

This paper evaluates the impact of smoking bans on smoking using a policy change introduced by the UK government. We present a theoretical model of smoking that defines an individual’s life-cycle addiction and cigarette consumption in the presence and in the absence of a public smoking...

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...

When a treatment in difference in differences (DD) is applied to a group of individuals with a time-constant qualifiÂ…cation/eligibility such as gender or race, there is no issue of choosing to be (un-)treated. But if the qualiÂ…fication is time-varying, then the individuals may alter...

This paper estimates the effect of informal care provision on female caregiver’s health. We use data from the German Socio-economic Panel and assess effects up to seven years after care provision. A simulation-based sensitivity analysis scrutinizes the sensitivity of the results with...

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...

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...