A utilitarian social planner who maximizes social welfare assigns the available income to those who are most efficient in converting income into utility. However, when individuals are concerned about their income falling behind the incomes of others, the optimal income distribution under...

In any nonlinear “difference-in-differences” model with strictly monotonic transformation function, the treatment effect is the cross difference of the observed outcome minus the cross difference of the potential non-treatment outcome, which equals the incremental effect of the interaction...

Inequality indices for self-assessed health and life satisfaction are typically constructed as functions of the cumulative distribution function. We present a unified methodology for the estimation of the resulting inequality indices. We also obtain explicit standard error formulas in the...

This paper analyses the relation between unemployment, marriage, divorce, widowhood and subjective well-being using Russian panel data. Contrary to Clark et al. (2008) and Clark and Georgellis (2013), we find little evidence of adaptation to these life events.

When doctors are unconstrained in setting fees, they charge higher fees to high income patients. For a standard GP consultation, the average fee gap is 25% of a minimum price. Competition closes this gap, but not local area income.

In a market where insurers are not allowed to risk rate, we find evidence of advantageous selection using observed health expenditure risk. Selection is driven by income and optimism about the future. This may explain insurers’ profitability, despite community rating.

Iron deficiency anemia is the most prevalent nutritional deficiency in the world, affecting more than 2 billion people in developing countries. We show that a modest cash transfer substantially reduced anemia among women of reproductive age in rural Ecuador.

Smoking bans in public places are considered an important public health intervention. The impact of such bans on health, and especially self-reported health, has not been widely considered in the literature. This paper investigates the impact of a public smoking ban on self-reported health...

In this study we investigate if risk attitudes explain non-enrollment into Medicare Part D. We find that respondents who are risk-tolerant as measured by the willingness-to-pay for a hypothetical insurance were significantly less likely to enroll in Part D.

We investigate the common assumption in applied research that reporting errors are negligible in variables where there is no clear incentive for misreporting. Using major medical operations, we find high misreporting rates, but the coefficients of their predictors remain unbiased.