Infectious disease is currently the main cause of mortality in the world and has been even more important historically. This paper reviews recent research in economic epidemiology. Specifically, it discusses the occurrence of infectious diseases and the effects of public health interventions...

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...

This paper reviews the public sector role in the provision of health care. A first role of the government is to use tax policy to correct externalities associated with individual behaviors. Estimates suggest that the external effects of many `sins' such as alcohol consumption are greater than...

Economists use micro-based and macro-based approaches to assess the effects of health on economic growth. The micro-based approach tends to find smaller effects than the macro-based approach, thus presenting a micro-macro puzzle regarding the economic return on health. We reconcile these two...

This paper provides a theoretical and empirical investigation of the positive complementarities between disease-specific policies introduced by competing risks of mortality. The incentive to invest in prevention against one cause of death depends positively on the level of survival from other...

Between 1960 and 1997, life expectancy at birth of Americans increased approximately 10% - from 69.7 to 76.5 years - and it has been estimated that the value of life extension during this period nearly equaled the gains in tangible consumption. We investigate whether an aggregate health...

I discuss the health transition in the United States, bringing new data to bear on health indicators, and investigating the changing relationship between health, income, and the environment. I argue that scientific advances played an outsize role and that health improvements were largest among...

We propose a "common-agency" model for explaining inefficient contracting in the U.S. healthcare system. In our setting, common-agency problems arise when multiple payers seek to motivate a shared provider to invest in improved care coordination. Our approach differs from other common-agency...

U.S. health care spending in 2012 totaled $2.8 trillion or 17.2 percent of gross domestic product. Given the magnitude of health care spending, the large public sector role in health care, and the reforms being implemented under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), we believe it...

We uncover political dynamics that reward and reinforce increases in US health spending by studying the passage of the 2003 Medicare Modernization (MMA). We focus on a provision added to the MMA, which allowed hospitals to apply for temporary Medicare payment increases. Hospitals represented by...