We conduct a quasi-Monte Carlo comparison of the recent developments in parametric and semi-parametric regression methods for healthcare costs against each other and against standard practice. The population of English NHS hospital inpatient episodes for the nancial year 2007-2008 (summed for...

This paper develops and estimates a model that integrates two fundamental theories of individual health behavior: the Becker-Murphy model of rational addiction and the Grossman model of health investment. We define an individual's lifetime smoking consumption pattern and investments in health...

This paper extends the literature on modelling healthcare cost data by applying the Generalised Beta of the Second Kind (GB2) distribution to UK data. A quasi-experimental design, estimating models on a subset of the data and evaluating performance on another subset, is used to compare this...

Understanding the data generating process behind healthcare costs remains a key empirical issue. Although much research to date has focused on the prediction of the conditional mean cost, this can potentially miss important features of the full conditional distribution such as tail...

Members of the National Child Development Study (NCDS) cohort attended very different types of secondary school, as their schooling lay within the transition period of the comprehensive education reform in England and Wales. This provides a natural setting to explore the impact of educational...