This paper uses the National Longitudinal Survey data set to examine the role of income uncertainty in explaining the likelihood of health insurance coverage among individuals. After controlling for a number of socioeconomic, demographic, and behavioral factors, the results suggest that...

In 2000, government deregulation along with the introduction of the long-term insurance scheme allowed for-profit providers of at-home care for the elderly to compete directly with nonprofit operators. According to the contract failure hypothesis, we would expect consumers to prefer nonprofit...

This paper employs U.S. metropolitan data to investigate the relationship between mortality rate and the business cycle. We utilize mortality and employment data that are specific to a given city, year and race/ethnic group. The analysis improves upon the existing literature by analyzing the...

This note introduces a generalized version of multi-component decomposition method, which disintegrates a growth rate of an index into the roles of individual components. The method can be applied to two classes of indices: the additive-product form and the product-additive form. The application...

We consider a model of vaccine market where the buyer is centralized and shows an endogenous demand function based on a simple stochastic SIR model. When the seller is a monopoly, we show that better vaccines (in the sense of greater efficiency or inducing less side-effects) do not imply greater...

Using National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey of 2007-2008, this paper presents estimates of the burden of undiagnosed pre-diabetes and racial disparities of the same in the US population. The true burden of undiagnosed pre-diabetes is found to be considerably more than the numbers...

Smoking is a leading cause for diseases and death. Information on factors affecting the smoking status is useful for policies on smoking reduction, especially in developing countries. This paper examines to what extent individuals' characteristics are correlated with the smoking status using a...

In this work, we study whether labour and leisure costs reported by informal caregivers must be analysed separately, using two comparable Spanish samples, for the years 1994 and 2004. We do this since informal care introduces an additional time constraint on the individual, which complicates the...

To test potential bilateral causalities relation between HIV-AIDS mortality and GDP, we propose a simple Granger noncausality test for heterogeneous panel data models. 44 African countries are selected for annual pooled data from 1990 to 2009. Results are presented for the heterogeneous...

In order to describe the process of tobacco quitting, we perform a VAR model and causality tests both on the monthly sales of tobacco products and nicotine dependence drugs in France, for the period going from February 2004 to April 2009. According to the path of tobacco quitting found out, it...