The purpose of this study is to analyse the determinants of life expectancy as proxy for health status of the OECD countries' population. A production function of health is used to explain expectancy life at birth for total and ageing population and according to gender. Socio-economic factors,...

Early intervention is considered the optimal response to developmental disorders in children. We evaluate a nationwide developmental screening programme for preschoolers in Austria and the resulting interventions. Identification of treatment effects is determined by a birthday cutoff-based...

Viruses are a major threat to human health, and - given that they spread through social interactions - represent a costly externality. This paper addresses three main issues: i) what are the unintended consequences of economic activity on the spread of infections? ii) how efficient are measures...

Early intervention is considered the optimal response to developmental disorders in children. We evaluate a nationwide developmental screening programme for preschoolers in Austria and the resulting interventions. Identification of treatment effects is determined by a birthday cutoff-based...

After years of stagnation and political cataclysms, Georgia tried to recover by launching radical economic and political reforms starting in 2004. The results of the reforms appeared to be impressive. The country's GDP has more than doubled; the total volume of bank deposits is five times what it...

The treatment of drinking water is advocated to reduce the incidence of child diarrhea. However, evaluating the impact of water treatment with only observational data leads to biased estimates since it could be the occurrence of child diarrhea that induced the household to treat their drinking...

The poorest nations of the world suffer from extreme disease burdens, which go largely untreated because weak incomes and the prevailing system of intellectual property rights fail to provide sufficient incentives to develop new treatments and distribute them at low cost. Recent price reductions...

Rising prevalence of obesity among adults and children is a major policy issue in many countries. Two widely discussed instruments to address obesity are a tax on unhealthy foods (fat tax) and a subsidy on healthy foods (thin subsidy). We compare these two policies to a sales tax on all food...

HPV infections can cause substantial burden in females and males as it is associated with several genital cancers, in addition to genital warts. Traditional economic evaluations often focus on quantifying cost-effectiveness, however, it is increasingly recognized that vaccinations may generate...

We exploit a large-scale natural experiment – the rollout of a nationwide electronic prescribing system in Finland – to study how digitization of prescriptions affects pharmaceutical use and health outcomes. We use comprehensive administrative data from patients treated with benzodiazepines,...