Does medical insurance affect health care demand and in the end contribute to improvements in the health status? Evidence for China for the year 2004, by means of the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), shows that health insurance does not affect health care demand in a significant manner....

Physicians are supposed to serve patients' interests, but some are more inclined to do so than others. This paper studies how the system of health care provision affects the allocation of patients to physicians when physicians differ in altruism. We show that allowing for private provision of...

This paper investigates the effects of health-care spending on mortality rates of heart attack patients. We relate in-hospital deaths to in-hospital end-oflife spending and post-discharge deaths to post-discharge health-care spending. In our analysis, we use detailed administrative data on...

In many Western countries, a sizeable group of people live on welfare benefits for a long time. Many of them suffer from mental health issues. This paper studies the labor market and mental health effects of an activation program targeting these long-term inactive people. We exploit the...

Economists and social scientists have debated the relative importance of nature (one's genes) and nurture (one's environment) for decades, if not centuries. This debate can now be informed by the ready availability of genetic data in a growing number of social science datasets. This paper...

We analyze how HIV-knowledge influences condom use across the sexes. The empirical work is based on a household survey conducted among 1,979 households of a representative group of market persons in Lagos in 2008. Last-time-condom-use is analyzed based on a Probit model while correcting for...

Disentangling age, period, and cohort effects in explaining health trends is crucial to assess future prevalences of health disorders. The identification problem -- age, period, and cohort effects are perfectly linearly related -- is tackled by modeling cohort and period effects using lifetime...