In Germany, employees are generally obliged to participate in the public health insurance system, where coverage is universal, co-payments and deductibles are moderate, and premia are based on income. However, they may buy private insurance instead if their income exceeds the compulsory...

We analyze child mortality in Vietnam focusing on gender aspects. Contrary to several other countries in the region, mortality rates for boys are substantially larger than for girls. A large rural-urban mortality difference exists, but much more so for boys than for girls. A higher education...

This paper aims at opening the black box of peer effects in adolescent weight gain. Using Add Health data on secondary schools in the U.S., we investigate whether these partly flow through the eating habits channel. Adolescents are assumed to interact through a friendship social network. We...

This paper investigates the impact of the public smoking ban which came into effect in Italy on January 2005 on individual smoking behaviour. Current empirical evidence supports the existence of a negative effect of the Italian ban on smoking prevalence and consumption in the general population....

Most economic models consider sleeping as a pre-determined and homogeneous constraint on individuals' time allocation neglecting its potential effects on health and human capital. Several medical studies provide evidence of important associations between sleep deprivation and health outcomes...

We use high-frequency data from location-based mobile phone records to measure domestic air travel patterns of the Chinese population during the Covid-19 pandemic. The travel and tourism industry is a key driver of China's domestic economy and data from this industry helps serve as an objective...

We analyze the short- and long-term effects of the U.S. Vietnam-era military service on veterans' health outcomes using a restricted version of the National Health Interview Survey 1974-2013 and employing the draft lotteries as an instrumental variable (IV). We start by assessing whether the...

Common mental health problems impose significant costs on individuals and societies, yet healthcare systems often overlook them. We provide the first causal evidence on the effectiveness of a pioneering, nationwide mental health service for treating depression and anxiety disorders in England...

We consider nonparametric identification and estimation in a nonseparable model where a continuous regressor of interest is a known, deterministic, but kinked function of an observed assignment variable. This design arises in many institutional settings where a policy variable (such as weekly...

This study investigates the short-term mortality effects of two age-based restrictions on legal access to alcohol in Germany. We exploit sharp differences in legal access to alcohol at 16 and 18 years by implementing a regression discontinuity design. We find discontinuous increases in deaths at...