Health outcomes and the quality of health care in Iceland are very good by international comparison, while income-related health inequality appears to be smaller than in most other countries. However, the health-care system is costly and, according to OECD estimates, public expenditure on health...

There are no ready-made data on hospital outputs and inputs which would allow comprehensive international comparisons of hospital efficiency to be carried out. This paper, therefore, relies on selected evidence to compare hospital efficiency in a subset of OECD countries, based on three...

This work aims to identify the determinants of health care utilization in Portugal and to quantify their effects. A clear idea about this may help the policy debate on the delivery and organization of health services. Toward this end, we developed an approach based on count data models. We found...

The purpose of this study is to shed light on the individual socio-economic status (SES) and demographic determinants of the demand for health care in a cross-comparison study of nine E.U. countries. It focuses on the effects of the individual employment status on alternative indicators of...

Background: Concern about ambulance diversion and emergency department (ED) overcrowding has increased scrutiny of ambulance use. Knowledge is limited, however, about clinical and economic factors associated with ambulance use compared to other arrival methods. Objectives: To compare clinical...

In efforts to decrease emergency department (ED) crowding and health care costs, frequent users of ED services have been targeted for interventions to decrease their utilization. Previous studies have had different definitions for frequent users and have considered all frequent users as a...

We specify a model for the lifetimes of spouses and the dynamic evolution of health, allowing spousal death to have causal effects on the health and mortality of the survivor. We estimate the model using a longitudinal survey that traces many health status aspects over time, and that is linked...

Using German data over the period 1956-2006, this study provides a comprehensive empirical analysis of factors driving aggregate mortality rates over time. It differs from previous contributions in this field by simultaneously considering an extensive set of macroeconomic, socioeconomic, and...

Globally, 9.7 million children under age five die from preventable causes each year. Yet, between 1990 and 2006, about 27 countries (mainly in sub-Saharan Africa) made no progress in reducing child mortality. Over 60% of maternal deaths occur in the poorest countries in the world. HIV/AIDS,...