The Philippines has placed a strong emphasis on achieving Universal Health Coverage. In recent years, earmarked funds from new alcohol and tobacco taxes have substantially increased government funds available for health. This additional funding offers great potential to improve access and health...

This article looks at the application of performance measurement systems in the health sector across OECD countries. The data comes from the 2017 OECD Survey on Performance Measurement Systems in the Health Sector and Responsibilities across Levels of Government. The results show that the...

Measuring health care productivity is important as health is a large sector of the economy and with the majority of funding coming from public sources, the outlook for productivity growth is a critical factor in the debate about fiscal sustainability. The UK has over 20 years’ experience of...

In light of the many discussions advocating the use of pay-for-performance and performance budgeting, this paper argues that discouraging experience with both approaches should temper expectations that performance measurement can be a reform that will make health care systems more "sustainable"...

We use data from the Irish census and exploit regional and temporal variation in infant mortality rates over the 20th century to examine effects of early life conditions on later life health. Our main identification is public health interventions which eliminated the Irish urban infant mortality...

We provide comparable evidence on the patterns and trends in obesity across the Atlantic and analyse whether there are economic rationales for public intervention to control obesity. We take into account equity issues as well as efficiency considerations, which are organized around three...

We investigate the evolution of health over the life-cycle. We allow for two sources of persistence: unobserved heterogeneity and state dependence. Estimation indicates that there is a large degree of heterogeneity. For half the population, there are modest degrees of state dependence. For the...

This paper uses longitudinal data to explore whether greater job status makes a person healthier. Taking the evidence as a whole, promotees do not exhibit a health improvement after promotion. Instead the data suggest that workers with good health are more likely to be promoted. In the private...

This paper evaluates the effect of excise taxes and bans on smoking in public places on the exposure to tobacco smoke of non-smokers. We use a novel way of quantifying passive smoking: we use data on cotinine concentration a metabolite of nicotine measured in a large population of non-smokers...

We investigate the evolution of health inequality over the life-course. Health is modeled as a latent variable that is determined by three factors: endowments, and permanent and transitory shocks. We employ Simulated Minimum Distance and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to estimate the model....