Alcohol consumption in Russia is legendary and has been reported to be the third leading cause of death in the former Soviet Union after heart disease and cancer. Are Russian alcohol consumers rational addicts? This paper uses eight rounds of a nationally representative Russian survey spanning...

This paper reconsiders the long-run economic relationship between health care expenditure and income using a panel of 20 OECD countries observed over the period 1971-2004. In particular, the paper studies the non-stationarity and cointegration properties between health care spending and income....

This paper presents wage curves for formal and informal workers using a rich individual level data for Turkey over the period 2005-2009. The wage curve is an empirical regularity describing a negative relationship between regional unemployment rates and individuals' real wages. While this...

This paper analyzes the Polish wage curve using individual data from the Polish Labor Force Survey (LFS) at the 16 NUTS2 regions over the period 1999 - 2010. This survey does not gather information on wages of self-employed or paid family workers. After excluding the unemployed, inactive and...

This paper reconsiders the Brazilian wage curve using individual data from the National Household Survey at 27 Federative Units over the period 2002 - 2009. We find evidence in favor of the Brazilian wage curve with an unemployment elasticity of -0.08 when the lagged unemployment rate is used as...

This paper investigates the factors that determine differences across OECD countries in health outcomes, using data on life expectancy at age 65, over the period 1960 to 2007. We estimate a production function where life expectancy depends on health and social spending, lifestyle variables, and...

This paper examines the Turkish wage curve using individual data from the Household Labor Force Survey (HLFS) including 26 NUTS-2 regions over the period 2005-2008. When the local unemployment rate is treated as predetermined, there is evidence in favor of the wage curve only for younger and...

This paper estimates spatial wage curves for formal and informal workers in Turkey using individual level data from the Turkish Household Labor Force Survey (THLFS) provided by TURKSTAT for the period 2008-2014. Unlike previous studies on wage curves for formal and informal workers, we extend...

This paper analyzes the relationship between higher education and body weight and smoking behavior among women in Turkey. We exploit the largely exogenous and substantial increase in the openings of universities throughout Turkey. Based on the spatial and temporal variability of university...