Risky health behaviors such as smoking, drinking alcohol, drug use, unprotected sex, and poor diets and sedentary lifestyles (leading to obesity) are a major source of preventable deaths. This chapter overviews the theoretical frameworks for, and empirical evidence on, the economics of risky...

Micro-based and macro-based approaches have been used to assess the effects of health on economic growth. Micro-based approaches aggregate the return on individual health from Mincerian wage regressions to derive the macroeconomic effects of population health. Macro-based approaches estimate a...

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is bringing about once-in-a-century changes to human society. This article summarizes key characteristics of the COVID-19 pandemic that should be incorporated in economics and health policy analyses. We then review the literature on the importance...

The apparently unrelenting growth in the GDP-share of health spending (SHS) has been a perennial issue of policy concern. Does an equilibrium limit exist? The issue has been left open in recent dynamic models which take income growth and population aging as given. We view these variables as...

This paper provides estimates of the economic impact of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in China and India for the period 2012-2030. Our estimates are derived using WHO's EPIC model of economic growth, which focuses on the negative effects of NCDs on labor supply and capital accumulation. We...

This paper exploits rich SOEP microdata to analyze state-level variation in health care utilization in Germany. Unlike most studies in the field of the Small Area Variation (SAV) literature, our approach allows us to net out a large array of individual-level and state-level factors that may...

We investigate how, in temporary economic hardship, agents change their consumption of health services, and how this depends on whether the service is universally free-of-charge visits to GP's or privately co-financed dental care. We find that own expenditures for dental care decrease. The...

Doing "more" in healthcare can be a major threat to the delivery of high-quality health care. This study used coarsened exact matching to test the hypothesis of supplier-induced demand (SID) by comparing health care utilization and expenditures between patients affiliated with healthcare...

Using 2002 cross-sectional data and 1998, 2000, 2002 three waves of panel data from the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey, we study health in oldest old population. We measure health using the Katz Index of Activities of Daily Living (ADL) and in term of mortality. Our results...

This paper attempts to estimate the impact of population ageing on house prices. There is considerable debate about whether population ageing puts downwards or upwards pressure on house prices. The empirical approach differs from earlier studies of this relationship, which are mainly regression...