Despite increasing calls for value-based payments, existing methodologies for determining physicians' "value added" to patient health outcomes have important limitations. We incorporate methods from the value added literature in education research into a health care setting to present the first...

This paper estimates the effects of friends' health behaviors, smoking and drinking, on own health behaviors for adolescents while controlling for the effects of correlated unobservables between those friends. Specifically, the effect of friends' health behaviors is identified by comparing...

This study investigates how maternal employment is related to the outcomes of 10 and 11 year olds after controlling for a wide variety of child, mother and family background characteristics. The results suggest that the mother's labor supply has deleterious effects on cognitive development,...

Occupation is discussed as a social determinant of health. Occupation has received little attention in this light in the economics literature. We examine occupation in a life-course framework and use measures of first-occupation, initial health, and mother's education. We contend that first...

This paper examines how estimates of the price elasticity of demand for beer vary with the choice of alcohol price series examined. Our most important finding is that the commonly used ACCRA price data are unlikely to reliably indicate alcohol demand elasticities--estimates obtained from this...

The long-standing inverse relationship between education and mortality strengthened substantially later in the 20th century. This paper examines the reasons for this increase. We show that behavioral risk factors are not of primary importance. Smoking has declined more for the better educated,...

The combination of economic and biological factors is likely to result in overeating, in the current environment of cheap and readily available food. This propensity is shown using a "dual-decision" approach where choices reflect the interaction between two parts of the brain: a "deliberative"...

Young (2005) argues that HIV related population declines reinforced by the fertility response to the epidemic will lead to higher capital-labor ratios and to higher per capita incomes in the affected countries of Africa. Using household level data on fertility from South Africa and relying on...

Using country- and region-level data, I investigate the effect of HIV/AIDS on fertility in Africa during 1985-2000. Results differ depending on the variation used and the estimation method. Between estimates that exploit cross-sectional variation suggest a positive significant effect of HIV/AIDS...

Using data from multiple sources, over the 1976-2009 period, I show that total mortality has shifted over time from strongly procyclical to being essentially unrelated to macroeconomic conditions. The relationship also shows some instability over time and is likely to be poorly measured when...