Population-based screening can prevent disease but also induce false positives to use low-value healthcare. Using data on individuals aged 40+ in rural South Africa and a multidimensional regression discontinuity design, we estimate effects of clinical referral based on blood pressure (BP) above...

The initial purpose of this study was to establish the effect of childhood conditions on longevity from the Brabant data set. This data set combines information at ages 12, 43, 53 and mortality between 53 and 71 for a sample of some 3000 individuals born around 1940 in the Dutch province of...

Social interactions are generally thought to play an important role in smoking initiation among adolescents. In this paper we exploit detailed friendship nominations in the US Add Health data, and extend the Spatial Autoregressive Model (SAR) model to deal with (i) endogenous peer selection, and...

We use newly collected individual-level hunger recall information from the China Family Panel Survey to estimate the causal effect of undernourishment on later-life health. We develop a Two-Sample Instrumental Variable (TSIV) estimator that can deal with heterogeneous samples. We find a...

Anecdotally, physical activity appears to be a textbook example of time inconsistency, which is the failure to follow through on ex-ante preferences and plans. Interestingly, our longitudinal survey finds that, over a fortnight, exercising more than preferred/planned is actually more prevalent...

Rapid urbanization could have positive and negative health effects, such that the net impact on population health is not obvious. It is, however, highly pertinent to the human welfare consequences of development. This paper uses community and individual level longitudinal data from the China...

In this paper, we examine the role of intertemporal and social preferences in explaining cooperation in a social dilemma. In the Netherlands, the COVID-19 pandemic raised an acute social dilemma when the government opted for an “intelligent lockdown” to contain the spread of the virus, based...

Sexual minorities have had worse than average mental health, which may have to do with actual or perceived discrimination. Same-sex marriage legalization (SSML) is a typical anti-discrimination policy removing marital restrictions for sexual minorities. We study how this legislation affected...

This paper develops a model of healthcare demand to study healthcare choices in resourcelimited settings with poor health indicators, especially for women. Using data from rural Nigeria on individual illnesses and injuries as well as the entire portfolio of locally available providers, we...

We investigate the impact on work absence of a massive reduction in paid sick leave benefits. We exploit a policy change that only affected public sector workers in Spain and compare changes in the number and length of spells they take relative to unaffected private sector workers. Our results...