Facing unprecedented uncertainty and drastic trade-offs between public health and other forms of human well-being, policymakers during the Covid-19 pandemic have sought the guidance of epidemiologists and economists. Unfortunately, while both groups of scientists use many of the same basic...

Employers structure pay and employment relationships to mitigate agency problems. A large literature in economics documents how the resolution of these problems shapes personnel policies and labor markets. For the most part, the study of agency in employment relationships relies on highly...

This paper calculates the value of experiencing mental illness, either directly or indirectly through knowing someone near, family, or friends (NFF), who is affected. Using the well-being valuation method, which explores the trade-offs between income and self-reported experiences that maintain...

There is a robust literature documenting the importance of physician practice style (e.g., the propensity to perform certain operations) in explaining outcomes related to patients' physical health. Yet little is known about the role of physicians in explaining patients' mental health outcomes....

We study how the societal disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic impacted diagnosis of a prevalent childhood mental health condition, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Using both nationwide private health insurance claims and a single state's comprehensive electronic health records,...

Using Austrian and Danish administrative data, we examine the impacts of parenthood on mental health equality. Parenthood imposes a greater mental health burden on mothers than on fathers. It creates a long-run gender gap in antidepressant prescriptions of about 93.2% (Austria) and 64.8%...

We use high-quality administrative data from Austria to credibly identify the causal effect of parental death on daughters' fertility. To account for the endogeneity of parental death, we exploit the timing of deaths in a difference-in-differences research design. Parental death has no...

Health economists have studied the determinants of the expected value of health status as a function of medical and nonmedical inputs, often finding small marginal effects of the former. This paper argues that both types of input have an additional benefit, viz. a reduced variability of health...

Many politicians blame physician dispensing (PD) to increase health care expenditure and to undermine independence of drug prescription and income leading to a suboptimal medication. Therefore, PD is not allowed in most OECD countries. In Switzerland, PD is allowed in some regions depending on...

The prevalence of mental ill-health is increasing among young people in many developed countries, raising concerns about their well-being. Experts have pointed to several potential contributing factors, including a heightened emphasis on educational achievement and performance evaluation, as...