This paper adopts a systems approach to estimate budget share equations for four categories of alcoholic drink and for tobacco using quarterly expenditure data for the period 1964 to 1983. The emphasis is on the importance of the tolerance effects of addiction and on the smoker's participation...

The double-hurdle model with dependence is extended by incorporating the Box-Cox transformation. The model nests a range of popular limited dependent variable models, including the Gaussian double-hurdle, the generalized Tobit, and two-part models. Estimates of US beef consumption suggest that...

This paper uses the British Health and Lifestyle Survey (1984-1985) data and the longitudinal follow-up of May 2003 to investigate the de- terminants of premature mortality risk in Great Britain and the con- tribution of lifestyle choices to socio-economic inequality in health. A behavioural...

This paper explores reporting bias and heterogeneity in the measure of self-assessed health (SAH) used in the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). The ninth wave of the BHPS includes the SF-36 general health questionnaire, which incorporates a different wording to the self-assessed health...

This paper provides an overview of microeconometric evidence on various aspects of smoking using data from the UK Health and Lifestyle Survey (HALS). In doing so it illustrates how the choice of an appropriate statistical model is influenced by the survey design and the definition and...

This paper presents an overview of microsimulation as a method to evaluate health and health care policies and interventions. After presenting a brief survey of microsimulation models and applications we describe the main features of the approach and how these are implemented in practice. We pay...

This paper explores reporting bias and heterogeneity in the measure of self-assessed health (SAH) used in the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). The ninth wave of the BHPS includes the SF-36 general health questionnaire, which incorporates a different wording to the self-assessed health...

This paper considers health-related non-response in the first eleven waves of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and the full eight waves of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) and explores its consequences for dynamic models of the association between socioeconomic status and...

The gateway, or stepping stone, hypothesis is important as it has had considerable influence on drug policy and legislation in many countries. The gateway hypothesis offers one possible explanation for young people's development of a serious drug problem. It simply states that the use of one...