This paper examines the determinants of very low birth weight infant (or neonatal) mortality using the Taiwan National Health Insurance Research database from 1997 to 2009. After infants are discharged from hospital, it is not possible to track their mortality, so the Cox proportional hazard...

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...

This paper estimates the effect of job loss on mortality for older male workers with strong labor force attachment. Using Dutch administrative data, we find that job loss due to sudden firm closure increased the probability to die within five years by a sizable 0.60 percentage points....

Measurement of inequity in health care delivery has focused on the extent to which health care utilisation is or is not distributed according to need, irrespective of income. Studies using cross-sectional data have proposed various ways of measuring and standardizing for need, but inevitably...

An age-cohort decomposition applied to panel data identifies how the mean, overall inequality and income-related inequality of self-assessed health evolve over the life cycle and differ across generations in 11 EU countries. There is a moderate and steady decline in mean health until the age of...

Purpose: This paper addresses the nature, formalization, and neural bases of (affective) social ties anddiscusses the relevance of ties for health economics. A social tie is defined as an affectiveweight attached by an individual to the well-being of another individual...

We estimate the impact of health and financial incentives on the retirement transitions of older workers in Spain. Individual measures of pension wealth, peak and accrual values are constructed using labor market histories and health shocks are derived as changes in a composite health stock...