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...

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...

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...

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...

Based on a survey of a random sample of Swedish females aged 20-40 this paper investigates: (1) whether women have correct perception of the age-related risk of female infertility, (2) whether the perceptions of the personal risk and the general risk in the own age group differ from each other,...

The question addressed in this paper is whether sickness history affects annual earnings and hourly wages in Sweden. If poor health makes people less productive, we expect to find a negative effect of previous health history on hourly wages. If, instead, poor health reduces people´s working...