We investigate the effect of variations in the price of opium in Afghanistan on per capita dispensation of prescription opioids in the US. Quarterly county-level data for 2003-2016 indicate that reductions in opium prices significantly increase the quantity of opioids prescribed. The increase...

This paper develops a new method for estimating production-function parameters that can be applied in differentiated-product industries with endogenous quality and variety choice. We take advantage of data on physical quantities of outputs and inputs from the Colombian manufacturing survey,...

This paper analyzes the effects of a legislative provision that grants a one-day paid leave of absence to blood donors who are employees in Italy. The analysis is based on a unique dataset with the complete donation histories of the blood donors in an Italian town. The cross-sectional variation...

Using longitudinal data on the entire population of blood donors in an Italian town, we examine how donors respond to an award scheme which rewards them with "medals" when they reach certain donation quotas. Our results indicate that donors significantly increase the frequency of their donations...

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...

We adopt the collective approach to consumer behavior with egoistic agents, and assume that the household consumption is either private or public. We then show that (i) household demands have to satisfy testable constraints and (ii) some elements of the decision process can be retrieved from...

This paper identifies health determinants in urban China applying Grossman model. Using wave of China Health and Nutrition Survey in 2000, we find that education has important positive effect on health, and cost of health care services has significantly negative impact. However, effects of wage...

In this paper an empirical model is developed where the collective household model is used as a basic framework to describe the time allocation problem. The collective model views household behavior as the outcome of maximizing a household utility function which is a weighted sum of the utility...

Although the number of immigrant households in the Netherlands is substantial, the labor supply choices of this group are usually neglected in empirical studies because these households are usually under-sampled. We use a stratified sample of Turkish, Surinamese/Antillean and Dutch households...

If the marginal utility of consumption depends on health status, this will affect the economic analysis of a number of central problems in public finance, including the optimal structure of health insurance and optimal life cycle savings. In this paper, we describe the promises and challenges of...