This paper examines the short- and medium-term effects of the PensionDanmark Health Scheme, the largest privately administered health program for workers in Denmark, which provides prevention and early management of work-related injuries. We use a difference-in-differences approach that exploits...

As the US pursues health care reform, it is important to understand the patterns in demand for, and opposition to, public provision of medical treatments. Using data from a nationally representative survey, we develop and estimate a utility-theoretic choice model to quantify demand for publicly...

This paper tests whether in utero conditions affect long-run developmental outcomes using the 1918 influenza pandemic in Taiwan as a natural experiment. Combining several historical and current datasets, we find that cohorts in utero during the pandemic are shorter as children/adolescents and...

Using the 2006 Homescan panel, we estimate the changes in energy, fat and sodium purchases resulting from a tax that increases the price of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) by 20% and the effect of such a tax on body weight. In addition to substitutions that may arise with other beverages, we...

This paper investigates whether cannabis use affects physical and mental health. To do so, information on prime aged individuals living in Amsterdam in 1994 is used. Dutch data offer a clear advantage in estimating the health impacts of cannabis use because the legal status of cannabis in the...

This paper explores four alternative indices for measuring health inequalities in a way that takes into account attitudes towards inequality. First, we revisit the extended concentration index which has been proposed to make it possible to introduce changes into the distributional value...

While several studies suggest that stress-related mental health problems among school children are related to specific elements of schooling, empirical evidence on this causal relationship is scarce. We examine a German schooling reform that increased weekly instruction time and study its...

This paper investigates the short-term effects of public smoking bans on individual smoking behavior. In 2007 and 2008, state-level smoking bans were gradually introduced in all of Germany's federal states. We exploit this variation to identify the effect that smoke-free policies had on...

This paper estimates the effect that premiums in Medicaid have on the length of enrollment of program beneficiaries. Whether and how low income-families will participate in the exchanges and in states’ Medicaid programs depends crucially on the structure and amounts of the premiums they will...

This paper revisits the relationship between nurse staffing and quality of care in nursing homes using an instrumental variables approach. Most prior studies rely on cross-sectional evidence, which renders causal inference problematic and policy recommendations inappropriate. We exploit...