In econometric risk-adjustment exercises, models estimated with one or more included endogenous explanatory variables ("risk adjusters") will generally result in biased predictions of outcomes of interest, e.g. unconditional mean healthcare expenditures. This paper shows that a first-order...

We find that alcoholism decreases labor force participation among prime age males, and therefore decreases the income of this group. The effects of alcoholism on the labor force participation of younger and older males and on the wage rates of prime age males are not significantly positive. We...

Various health-, quality-, and disability-adjusted life year or life expectancy (HALY, QALY, DALY; HALE, QALE, DALE) measures have become gold standards for defining outcomes in technology evaluation, population health monitoring, and other evaluative efforts. As such, it is critical that the...

The economic costs of adverse health outcomes have typically been evaluated in a context of risk neutrality, an approach that ignores the potential welfare importance of individuals' risk preferences. This paper presents a framework that unifies the research in health capital and earnings with...

Appreciating how propensities to be immunized against the flu depend on individual characteristics and environments is essential if policies regarding influenza control are to be sensibly formulated. Beyond epidemiology, there are some important economic issues that must be addressed if the...

Practitioners of empirical health economics might be forgiven for paying little heed to the recent 50th anniversary of the publication of one of the most important papers in its methodological heritage: James Tobin's widely-cited 1958 Econometrica paper that developed what later became known as...

Although individuals are all endowed with the same time budgets, time use patterns differ owing to heterogeneity in preferences and constraints. In today's health policy arena there is considerable discussion about how to improve health outcomes by increasing levels of physical activity. In this...

The misuse of alcoholic beverages ('problem drinking') has been demonstrated to result in enormous economic costs; most of these costs have been shown to be reduced productivity in the labor market. The purpose of this paper is to present sound structural estimates of the relationship between...

Estimation of marginal or partial effects of covariates x on various conditional parameters or functionals is often the main target of applied microeconometric analysis. In the specific context of probit models such estimation is straightforward in univariate models, and Greene, 1996, 1998, has...

This paper describes and applies econometric strategies for estimating regression models of economic share data outcomes where the shares may take boundary values (zero and one) with nontrivial probability. The main focus of the paper is on the conditional mean structures of such data. The paper...