Tradeoffs between monetary wealth and fatal safety risks are summarized in the value of a statistical life (VSL), a measure that is widely used for the evaluation of public policies in medicine, the environment, and transportation safety. This paper demonstrates the widespread use of this...

This paper adopts a labor market economics perspective to understanding the crisis of health care professionals in Africa. Five challenges resulting from this crisis are identified: a production challenge, an underutilization challenge, a distributional challenge, a performance challenge, and a...

Health economists have largely ignored complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) as an area of research, although both clinical experiences and several empirical studies suggest cost-effectiveness of CAM. The objective of this paper is to explore the cost-effectiveness of CAM compared to...

A recent debate in the medical literature has arisen around the mortality effects of obesity. Whereas it has been argued that the obese die younger, the data that have become available do not immediately support this. This potentially undermines the hypothesis that modern life with its physical...

The COVID–19 pandemic has challenged the capacity of healthcare systems around the world and can potentially compromise healthcare utilization and health outcomes among non-COVID–19 patients. Using monthly panel data of nationally representative middle-aged and older Singaporeans, we...

HIV continues to cause the largest number of disability-adjusted life years of any disease in HIV hyperendemic countries (i.e., countries with an adult HIV prevalence 15%). We compare the benefits and costs of two proven biological interventions to reduce the health losses due to the HIV...

We investigate the causal impact of retirement on healthcare utilization using SHARE data for 10 European countries. We show that the number of doctor's visits and the probability of visiting a doctor more than four times a year (our measures of healthcare utilization) increase after retirement....

Using Mexico's 2002 wave of the Encuesta Nacional de Ingresos y Gastos de los Hogares (ENIGH), we find that international remittances raise health care expenditures. Approximately 6 pesos of every 100 peso increment in remittance income are spent on health. The sensitivity of health care...

We ran a randomized field experiment to ascertain whether a costless manipulation of the informational content (restricted or enhanced information) and the framing (gain or loss framing) of the invitation letter to the breast cancer screening program in Messina, Italy, affects the take-up rate....

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....