This paper examines the determinants of very low birth weight infant (or neonatal) mortality using the Taiwan National Health Insurance Research database from 1997 to 2009. After infants are discharged from hospital, it is not possible to track their mortality, so the Cox proportional hazard...

While a growing literature examining the relationship between income and health expenditures suggests that health care is a luxury good, this conclusion is contentiously debated due to heterogeneity of the existing results. This paper tests the luxury good hypothesis using meta-regression...

We compare the distributional consequences of two different waiting times initiatives. The primary focus of Scotland’s recent waiting time reforms has been on reducing maximum waiting times through the imposition of high profile national targets. In Norway, the focus has been on appropriate...

We analyze the impacts of birth order and presence/absence of siblings on risk preferences with respect to economic, health/safety, and sport/lifestyle related risks. We study both the answer to a hypothetical lottery question and stated risky behavior and find that middle-borns are consistently...

We study how gender, birth-order and number of siblings are related to stated time and risk preferences and real-life decisions. We use survey data covering about 2,300 individuals and find that time and risk preferences are significantly correlated among women but not among men. We also find...

Providing health insurance involves a trade-off between the benefits from risk spreading and the costs due to moral hazard. Focusing on pharmaceuticals consumption, this paper examines theoretically whether reference pricing, requiring individuals to pay the price difference if, in this case,...

Should governments allow parallel trade of pharmaceuticals? There is no clear-cut answer to this question, since parallel trade causes some public concerns. One is that prices might not decrease much in the home country because consumers are price insensitive as a result of medical insurance....

In this paper we investigate reporting heterogeneity in the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) when it is used to measure current health status in cardiovascular patients. We provide a new framework to identify reporting heterogeneity using quantile regressions. EQ-5D responses are used as a proxy to...

During the late nineteenth century the physical stature of New Zealandborn men stagnated, despite an apparently beneficial public health environment and growth in per-capita incomes. Stature varied by social class, with professionals and men in rural occupations substantially taller than their...

Recently there has been a surge in interest on how HIV/AIDS affects fertility in countries hit by the disease. In this study, the effect of communal HIV/AIDS on fertility in rural Malawi is estimated using individual data from the 2004 Malawi Demographic and Health Survey on fertility and the...