This article discusses measurement of socioeconomic inequalities in the prevalence of a health condition, in response to the recent exchange between Guido Erreygers and Adam Wagstaff, in which they discuss the merits of their own corrections to the frequently used concentration index. We first...

The concentration index is widely used to measure income-related inequality in health. No insight exists, however, whether the concentration index connects with people's preferences about distributions of income and health and whether a reduction in the concentration index reflects an increase...

This study examines the impact of early life malaria exposure on cognition in sample of Mexican adults, using the nationwide introduction of malaria eradication efforts to identify causal impacts. The core findings are that birth year exposure to malaria eradication was associated with increases...

Research in the health sciences reports persistent racial differences in health care access, utilization, and outcomes. This study investigates three potential sources of these disparities – differential quality of care, physician discrimination, and patient response to therapy. It uses a...

How do medical errors affect physician behavior? Despite the importance of this question empirical evidence about it remains limited. This paper studies the impact of obstetricians’ medical errors that resulted in malpractice litigation on their subsequent choice of whether to perform a...

Social scientists continue to devote considerable attention to spillover effects for risky behaviors because of the important policy implications and the persistent challenges in identifying unbiased causal effects. We use the natural experiment of assigned college roommates to estimate peer...

We provide new cross-country evidence on smoking persistence in Europe, which can be due to both true state dependence and individual unobserved heterogeneity. We distinguish between the two by using semi-parametric nonlinear panel data methods, applied to both the smoking participation and the...

Predicting health care utilization is the foundation of many health economics analyses, such as calculating risk-adjustment capitation payments or measuring equity in health care utilization. The most common econometric models of physician utilization are parametric count data models, since the...

To date, only a few studies have assessed determinants of health trajectories using longitudinal health survey data.

This paper examines how estimates of the price elasticity of demand for beer vary with the choice of alcohol price series examined. Our most important finding is that the commonly used ACCRA price data are unlikely to reliably indicate alcohol demand elasticities—estimates obtained from this...