Eating disorders are an important and growing health concern, and bulimia nervosa (BN) accounts for the largest fraction of eating disorders. Health consequences of BN are substantial and especially serious given the increasingly compulsive nature of the disorder. However, remarkably little is...

The bivariate probit model is frequently used for estimating the effect of an endogenous binary regressor (the "treatment") on a binary health outcome variable. This paper discusses simple modifications that maintain the probit assumption for the marginal distributions while introducing...

There have been many studies of the volume-outcome relationship. In all of these, the unit of analysis is the hospital or physician. However, this level of analysis is mostly limited to the use of in-hospital mortality rates and is particularly sensitive to selective referral. Moreover, the...

We study the short-run effect of involuntary job loss on comprehensive measures of public health costs. We focus on job loss induced by plant closure, thereby addressing the reverse causality problem of deteriorating health leading to job loss as job displacements due to plant closure are...

Applications of zero-inflated count data models have proliferated in health economics. However, zero-inflated Poisson or zero-inflated negative binomial maximum likelihood estimators are not robust to misspecification. This paper proposes Poisson quasi-likelihood estimators as an alternative....

Typical of the AIDS epidemics is that governments in developing countries under-invest in drugs production because of the possible appearance of a curative vaccine. We design a set of financial tools allowing to hedge against this event and achieving full risk-sharing. We show that the...

Typical of the AIDS epidemics is that governments in developing countries under-invest in drugs production because of the possible appearance of a curative vaccine. We design a financial tool allowing to hedge against this event. We show that the introduction of this asset increases social...

Neoclassical economic theory rules out systematic errors in consumption choice. According to the basic view, individuals know what they choose. They are able to predict how much utility an activity or a good produces for them now and in the future and they can maximize their utility. This...

Obesity is increasing worldwide for both adults and children. Genetic disposition is responsible for some variation in body weight but cannot explain the dramatic increase in the last two decades. The increase must be due to structural and behavioral changes. One such behavioral change is the...

We study the impact of the integration of women in US policing between the late 1970s and early 1990s on violent crime reporting and domestic violence escalation. Along these two key dimensions, we find that female officers improved police quality. Using crime victimization data, we find that as...