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...

A key question underpinning health production, and one that remains relatively unexplored, is the influence of socio-economic and environmental factors on weight gain and obesity. Such issues acquire particular relevance when data from two Mediterranean countries (Italy and Spain) are compared....

Western societies can reduce avoidable mortality and morbidity by better understanding the relationship between obesity and chronic disease. This paper examines the empirical association between obesity and the incidence of heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, and elevated cholesterol. We...

The hypothesis of the reciprocal determination of obesity and depression (OD) epidemics, contrasts with the anecdotal wisdom of a person being 'jolly and fat', and calls for a better understanding of any underpinning socio-environmental determinants. This paper deals with the influence of...

Increasing the adoption of generic drugs has the potential to improve static efficiency in a health system without harming pharmaceutical innovation. However, very little is known about the timing of generic adoption and diffusion. No prior study has empirically examined the differential launch...

Although measures of sensitivity to inequality are important in judging the welfare effects of health-care programmes, it is far from straightforward how to elicit them and apply them in health-care decision making. This paper provides an overview of the literature on the measurement of...

Although measures of sensitivity to inequality are important in judging the welfare effects of health-care programmes, it is far from straightforward how to elicit them and apply them in health-care decision making. This paper provides an overview of the literature on the measurement of...

Generic competition in the pharmaceutical market is an effective cost-containment mechanism that improves static efficiency and stimulates pharmaceutical innovation. There is no prior study that has empirically analysed the relative delays in adoption of generic competition. This paper aims to...

Understanding how price regulations affect the adoption of new patent-protected pharmaceutical technologies is a crucial question in designing health systems. This paper addresses this question by examining how price expectations shape the probability of launch, controlling for competition,...

We exploit lottery wins to investigate the effects of exogenous changes to individuals' income on health care demand in the United Kingdom. This strategy allows us to estimate lottery income elasticities for a range of health care services that are publicly and privately provided. The results...