Life expectancy in the United States fares poorly in international comparisons, primarily because of high mortality … rates above age 50. Its low ranking is often blamed on a poor performance by the health care system rather than on … behavioral or social factors. This paper presents evidence on the relative performance of the US health care system using death …

We project the effects of declining smoking and increasing obesity on mortality in the United States over the period … current and age-25 obesity status observed in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 1988-2006. Projections of … cancer. We find that both changes in smoking and in obesity are expected to have large effects on mortality. For males, the …

Women have worse self-rated health and more hospitalization episodes than men from early adolescence to late middle age …, but are less likely to die at each age. We use 14 years of data from the U.S. National Health Interview Survey to examine … this paradox. Our results indicate that the difference in self-assessed health between women and men can be entirely …

public health and welfare partly depend on whether, and to what extent, advertising: 1) raises "selective" or brand …

than the less affluent. There is little doubt about the existence of this socio-economic gradient in health, but there … relationships between socio-economic status and health. We describe the approach of testing for the absence of causal channels …, and we repeat their analysis using the full range of data that have become available in the Health and Retirement Study …