In health care systems today, including those of Switzerland and the United States, participants do not necessarily see the big picture of lifetime health costs and quality of life, and in many systems consumers and providers lack the incentives to manage preventative and chronic care to...

We study the Medicare Part D prescription drug insurance program as a bellwether for designs of private, non-mandatory health insurance markets, focusing on the ability of consumers to evaluate and optimize their choices of plans. Our analysis of administrative data on medical claims in Medicare...

This paper proposes a joint model of tobacco consumption and mortality over the life-cycle. The decision to smoke is a trade off between current utility derived from smoking and a mortality risk increasing with age. Individuals with a longer potential life expectancy have more incentive to cut...

This paper develops a conceptual framework that can explain why economic development goes along with increases in body weight and obesity rates. We first introduce the concept of novelty consumption, which refers to an increase in food availability due to trade or innovation. Then we study how...

The goal of this project is to investigate the influence of economic and social factors on the demand for alcohol in modern Russia. The regression models are estimated on the base of "The Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS-HSE)" 1994-2011. There are three classic models of demand for...

Gaps in welfare attainment between boys and girls in China have attracted international attention. In this paper demand analysis is used to try and uncover the factors which may be driving the emergence of the gender gaps. Drawing on household expenditure data from a poor (Sichuan) and rich...

This paper develops a conceptual framework that can explain why economic development goes along with increases in body weight and obesity rates. We first introduce the concept of novelty consumption, which refers to an increase in food availability due to trade or innovation. Then we study how...

This paper compares a number of economic models of addiction. We show that they are all characterised by specific assumptions relating to tastes, changes in tastes, information and dynamic consistency. From a normative point of view, this rich set of assumptions may justify liberal as well as...

How should we evaluate public health policy when unobservable heterogeneities create not only differences in the intercept of the regression lines, but also differences in policy effects (i.e. slopes) ? This paper applies a method based on latent class models, to evaluate the impact of...

A central prediction of the quasi-hyperbolic model of time preference is that consumers will be impatient over short-run tradeoffs. I present the first nonlaboratory test of this implication using data on the nutritional intake of food stamp recipients. Caloric intake declines by 10 to 15...