This paper presents simple measures of individual and family mental health indices based on axiomatic foundations and integrates mental health into a neoclassical model that allows for proper substitution possibilities in the family preferences and quantifies its significance in family utility....

Using primary household data from India we estimate family utility function parameters that measure the relative importance of consumption, schooling of children and health (both physical and mental) and find that mental health is far more important than consumption or children’s schooling in...

Obesity and diabetes are increasingly attributed to environmental factors, however, little attention has been paid to influence of the 'local' food economy. This paper examines the association of measures relating to the built environment and the ‘local’ food economy with county-level...

The accuracy required in the measurement of output is an issue that has as yet still not been satisfactorily addressed in empirical research on efficiency in primary health care. We exploit information retrieved from a newly constructed database (APEX06) for the Spanish region of Extremadura....

The purpose of this paper is twofold: 1) to highlight the widely ignored but fundamental problem of ‘superpopulations’ for the use of inferential statistics in development studies. We do not to dwell on this problem however as it has been sufficiently discussed in older papers by...

We provide a comprehensive overview of latent Markov (LM) models for the analysis of longitudinal data. The main assumption behind these models is that the response variables are conditionally independent given a latent process which follows a first-order Markov chain. We first illustrate the...

In the context of multilevel longitudinal data, where sample units are collected in clusters, an important aspect that should be accounted for is the unobserved heterogeneity between sample units and between clusters. For this aim we propose an approach based on nested hidden (latent) Markov...

We consider a set of minimal identification conditions for dynamic factor models. These conditions have economic interpretations, and require fewer number of restrictions than when putting in a static-factor form. Under these restrictions, a standard structural vector autoregression (SVAR) with...

We propose a generalized method of moment (GMM) estimator of the number of latent factors in linear factor models. The method is appropriate for panels a large (small) number of cross-section observations and a small (large) number of time-series observations. It is robust to heteroskedasticity...

In this paper we examine the effect of dollar stores on children's Body Mass Index (BMI). We use a dataset compiled by the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement which created and implemented the BMI screening process for all public school children in the state of Arkansas. We combine propensity...