This paper empirically assesses the relative role of health plan prices, service quality and optional benefits in the decision to choose a health plan. We link representative German SOEP panel data from 2007 to 2010 to (i) health plan service quality indicators, (ii) measures of voluntary...

While a growing literature examining the relationship between income and health expenditures suggests that health care is a luxury good, this conclusion is contentiously debated due to heterogeneity of the existing results. This paper tests the luxury good hypothesis (namely that income...

Recent health care centralization trends raise the important question of the extent to which the quality of emergency medical services may offset effects from decreased access to emergency health care. This article analyzes whether residential proximity from an emergency room affects the...

Home equity has a strong impact on individual health. In UK household panel data home equity lowers the likelihood of home owners exhibiting a broad range of medical conditions. This is due to increased use of private health care, reduced hours of work and increased exercise. Home equity, unlike...

This paper proposes a test for the existence and the degree of contagious presenteeism and negative externalities in sickness insurance schemes. First, we theoretically decompose moral hazard into shirking and contagious presenteeism behavior. Then we derive testable conditions for reduced...

Health Expenditure has been rising faster than the growth of income in most industrial countries. The objective of this paper is to discover what factors determined Health Expenditure per head of population in the G7 Countries and whether governments could control them. The analysis has...

We identify the ages that constitute critical periods in children’s development towards their adult health status. For this we use data on families migrating into Sweden from countries that are mostly poorer, with less healthy conditions. Long-run health is proxied by adult height. The...

This paper uses a variant of the Lotka-Volterra system explaining the dynamic interaction between populations of infected and healthy individuals in which the demographic and epidemiological parameters (the net healthy birth rate, the death rate of the infected and the infection rate) are...

We develop a new model of addictive behavior that takes as a starting point the classic rational addiction model of Becker and Murphy, but incorporates uncertainty. We model uncertainty through the Wiener stochastic process. This process captures both random events such as anxiety, tensions and...

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...