While childhood obesity has become a significant public health concern over the last few decades, knowledge concerning the origins of or persistence in childhood anthropometric measures is incomplete. Here, we utilize several nonparametric measures of mobility to assess the evolution of weight,...

A recent debate in the medical literature has arisen around the mortality effects of obesity. Whereas it has been argued that the obese die younger, the data that have become available do not immediately support this. This potentially undermines the hypothesis that modern life with its physical...

Hospital heterogeneity is a major issue in defining a reimbursement system. If hospitals are heterogeneous, it is difficult to distinguish which part of the differences in costs is due to cost containment efforts and which part cannot be reduced, because it is due to other unobserved sources of...

In many areas of health care financing, there is controversy over the sources of cost variability and about the respective roles of inefficiency versus legitimate heterogeneity. This paper proposes a payment system that creates incentives to increase hospital efficiency when hospitals are...

We study the effects of a change in the way patient reimbursements are calculated on the prices of pharmaceuticals using quasi-experimental data for Denmark which switched from external (where reimbursements are based on prices of similar products in foreign countries) to internal reference...

Reference prices constitute a main determinant of patient health care reimbursement in many countries. We study the effects of a change from an "external" (based on a basket of prices in other countries) to an "internal" (based on comparable domestic products) reference price system. We find...

Rates of childhood obesity have increased dramatically in the last few decades. Non-causal evidence suggests that childhood obesity is highly persistent over the life cycle. However little is known about the origins of this persistence. In this paper we attempt to answer three questions. First,...

We focus on the role that the transmission of information between a multilateral (the IMF) and a country has for the optimal design of conditional reforms. Our model predicts that when agency problems are especially severe, and/or IMF information is valuable, a centralized control is indeed...

The paper focuses on the signaling value of a tax when agents are less informed than the government on the effect of their consumption. The policy making process is analyzed as a game in which the government wants to influence consumers' behaviors through tax policy, consumers being rational and...

Do episodes of mental health problems cause future mental health problems, and if yes, how strong are these dynamics? We quantify the degree of persistence in mental health problems using nationally-representative, longitudinal data from Australia and system GMM-IV and correlated random effects...