Reference points influence economic decisions. This paper considers how health reference points and their adaptation to decreasing health influence medical spending, consumption, and investment in a dynamic model. A static reference point implies an aspiration to offset health losses already at...

This paper integrates into public economics a biologically founded, stochastic process of individual ageing. The novel approach enables us to quantitatively characterize the optimal joint design of health and retirement policy behind the veil of ignorance for today and in response to future...

This paper integrates into public economics a biologically founded, stochastic process of individual ageing. The novel approach enables us to investigate the interaction between health and retirement policy in order to quantitatively characterize the optimal joint design of the social insurance...

In this chapter, we use the Social Security Administration’s simulation model known as MINT (Modeling Income in the Near Term) to examine the projected health and economic status of Baby Boomers and their parents during retirement. Our projections indicate that boomers will enjoy higher levels...

This chapter summarizes the results of 11 studies that were conducted on the relationship between health and attitude toward bribery. Additional summaries will be published in the second volume of this series, The Ethics of Bribery: Country Studies

After the reform and opening, “religious belief fevers” can be seen in many regions of rural China. Using a rural household dataset from Song County in He Nan Province, this research, by a Logit regression model, has analyzed the key factors that affect the religion choices of the villagers,...

This paper looks at the links between health and socio-economic status. It is generally assumed by non-economists that it is low SES that causes ill health, but this paper asks whether the causation might also work the other way. Even if the direction of causation is that SES mainly affects...

We study the contribution of health-related behaviors to the health-education gradient by distinguishing between short-run and long-run mediating effects: while in the former only current or lagged behaviors are taken into account, in the latter we consider the entire history of behaviors. We...

The prevalence and importance of children's physical health problems have been increasingly recognized in recent years. Physical health problems of children such as obesity, motor impairment and chronic diseases cause social costs. Further, they can lead directly to adult physical health...

This paper examines the impact of outdoor and indoor pollution on children's health from birth until the age of three years in Germany. We use representative data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), combined with five air pollution levels. These data come from the Federal Environment...