The aim of this paper is to assess the impact of the Community Health Center (CHC) on health levels in the U.S. Using infant mortality as the underlying health indicator, a time series of large counties as the data set, and multivariate regression techniques, we investigate the extent to which...

Mortality rates in the US fell more rapidly during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries than any other period in American history. This decline coincided with an epidemiological transition and the disappearance of a mortality "penalty" associated with living in urban areas. There is little...

In 2006, Massachusetts passed health care reform legislation designed to achieve nearly universal coverage through a combination of insurance market reforms, mandates, and subsidies that later served as the model for national reform. Using data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance...

Governments in many low- and middle-income countries are developing health insurance products as a complement to tax-funded, subsidized provision of health care through publicly operated facilities. This paper discusses two rationales for this transition. First, health insurance would boost...

There are ongoing debates around the world over the value of private supplements to public health insurance systems. We investigate this issue in the context of one of the world's deadliest diseases, diabetes, and one of the countries with the worst diabetes problems in the world, Mexico. We...

Adverse behavioral risk factors contribute to a large share of deaths. We examine the effects on life expectancy (LE) and quality-adjusted life expectancy (QALE) of changes in six major behavioral risk factors over the 1960-2010 period: smoking, obesity, heavy alcohol use, and unsafe use of...

U.S. fertility rose from a low of 2.27 children for women born in 1908 to a peak of 3.21 children for women born in 1932. It dropped to a new low of 1.74 children for women born in 1949, before stabilizing for subsequent cohorts. We propose a novel explanation for this boom-bust pattern, linking...