Under the assumption of no unmeasured confounders, a large literature exists on methods that can be used to estimating average treatment effects (ATE) from observational data and that spans regression models, propensity score adjustments using stratification, weighting or regression and even the...

Instrumental variables methods (IV) are widely used in the health economics literature to adjust for hidden selection biases in observational studies when estimating treatment effects. Less attention has been paid in the applied literature to the proper use of instrumental variables if treatment...

This paper estimates the effect of informal care provision on female caregiver’s health. We use data from the German Socio-economic Panel and assess effects up to seven years after care provision. A simulation-based sensitivity analysis scrutinizes the sensitivity of the results with...

This paper presents an overview of microsimulation as a method to evaluate health and health care policies and interventions. After presenting a brief survey of microsimulation models and applications we describe the main features of the approach and how these are implemented in practice. We pay...

An increasing amount of empirical evidence suggests that patients with higher socioeconomic status wait less within publicly-funded hospitals to receive non-emergency (elective) surgery. Using data from Australia, we investigate the extent to which such gradient can be explained by sample...

The general aim of this paper is to review how matching methods try to solve the evaluation problem – with a particular focus on propensity score matching – and their usefulness for the particular case of health programme evaluation. The “classical” case of matching estimation with a...

This paper evaluates the impact of smoking bans on smoking using a policy change introduced by the UK government. We present a theoretical model of smoking that defines an individual’s life-cycle addiction and cigarette consumption in the presence and in the absence of a public smoking...

This paper introduces a new approach to measuring the association between health and socioeconomic status. Measuring inequalities in health is difficult when health is measured qualitatively, specifically on an ordinal scale. This paper demonstrates a rank-based dependence measure - the copula -...

The discernment of relevant factors driving health care utilization constitutes one important research topic in Health Economics. This issue is frequently addressed through specification of regression models for health care use (y – often measured by number of doctor visits) including, among...

A copula is best described, as in Joe (1997), as a multivariate distribution function that is used to bind each marginal distribution function to form the joint. The copula parameterises the dependence between the margins, while the parameters of each marginal distribution function can be...