This paper investigates the potential of maternal and infant health programs to improve the life expectancy of women and children. We study a program trialed 1931-33 in seven Swedish medical districts, assembling individual data from parish records and aggregate data from annual reports of...

This paper analyses the effects of hospital closures in Germany in the context of emergency medical care for patients with acute myocardial infarction or hemorrhagic stroke. Using a comprehensive inpatient care data, I evaluate the extent of the impact of hospital closures between 2006 and 2012...

This study examines the effects of a nationwide shock-responsive social cash transfer scheme during an aggregate shock, with a focus on highly risk susceptible informal sector households in Kenya. Leveraging primary in-person survey data in a doubly robust difference-in-differences framework, we...

'Stock estimates' of missing women suggest that the problem is concentrated in South and East Asia and among young children. In contrast, `flow estimates’ suggest that gender bias in mortality is much larger, is as severe among adults as it is among children in India and China, and is larger...

This paper examines the effects of hospital case volume on quality of care on the example of intact abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) and hip fracture (HIP). We conduct the analysis on patient level with multiple logistic regression analysis. Quality is measured with a binary variable which...

Medical technological progress has been shown to be the main driver of health care costs. A key policy question is whether new treatment options are worth the additional costs. In this paper we assess the causal effect of percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA), a major new heart...

This paper examines the causal effect of the experience of a hospital with treating hip fractures (volume) on treatment outcome for patients. A full sample of administrative data from Germany for the year 2007 is used. We apply an instrumental variable approach to eliminate endogeneity concerns...

This paper investigates the relationship between health outcomes and variations in staffing levels as approximated by admissions on weekdays versus admissions on weekends. Because days of admission are potentially endogenous, we instrument on emergency admissions only, which are reasonably...

Theoretically, there are several reasons to expect education to have a positive effect on health, and empirical research suggests that education can be an important health determinant. However, it has not yet been established whether education and health are indeed causally-related, and the...

The strong association between income and mortality raises the question whether more generous social security systems could improve poor people’s health outcomes. Thus, in this paper, I analyze whether a major social security innovation, the introduction of social pensions targeted at poor...