Despite being widely used in health economics, dynamic models of health and healthcare typically assume that the persistence in these outcomes is the same for every individual. Understanding the extent and drivers of heterogeneity in persistence is essential for the design and evaluation of...

In England as elsewhere, policy makers are trying to reduce the pressure on costs due to rising hospital admissions by encouraging GPs to refer fewer patients to hospital specialists. This could have an impact on elective treatment levels, particularly procedures for conditions which are not...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the effect of medical health benefits liabilities on firms' share prices. First, we find that investors tend to over-react to healthcare obligations, with a one percent increment in healthcare liabilities leading to a more than one per cent decline in the...

We construct a unified objective measure of health status: the frailty index, defined as the cumulative sum of all adverse health indicators observed for an individual. First, we show that the frailty index has several advantages over self-reported health status, particularly when studying...

This paper extends the health economics literature with a risk based Random Utility Model for discrete medical treatments choice analysis using Population level observational data. The model is based on a subjective interpretation of the choice probabilities, and the economic theory of decision...

Background Productivity in the healthcare sector has evolved as an appealing research topic in the last few years. Despite the growing interest, the extant scientific literature mostly concentrates on methodologies rather than theoretical and practical insights. Although diverse methodologies...

This paper examines major problems that are associated with the healthcare system in the United States. Problems discussed include the rising cost of healthcare in America, high cost of drugs, variation in hospital costs, the proliferation of new prescription drugs that provide little or no...

Health economists have studied the determinants of the expected value of health status as a function of medical and nonmedical inputs, often finding small marginal effects of the former. This paper argues that both types of input have an additional benefit, viz. a reduced variability of health...

We develop a perpetual youth model to investigate how longevity affects economic growth and welfare. Life expectancy is determined by individuals' investments in healthcare. We find that improvements in the healthcare technology always increase the steady state growth rate. Although the effect...

We propose simple modifications for the Kakwani tax progressivity measure that make it suitable for evaluating access inequality for medical services. Our modification is to measure inequality using the ratio of the concentration index to the Gini coefficient instead of the difference between...