Amid increasing interest in how social relationships play an important role in health and health behavior, it remains unclear whether social activities and social capital in general benefit individuals' health literacy and in turn affect their health care consumption. More specifically, this...

Stakeholder groups have different interests in health claims which may be complementary but also conflicting. It is not clear on beforehand, how managers should deal with legal requirements on claims. Nor is it clear how legal authorities can adjust the present claims regime to address market,...

This paper investigates the consequences that patients face when their regular primary care provider closes down her practice, typically due to retirement. We estimate the causal impact of closures on patients' utilization patterns, medical expenditures, hospitalizations, and health plan choice....

This paper communicates results from a statistical investigation into questions of relationships between sources of health-care information, data sufficiency, and final outcomes of Vietnamese patients' choice of health-care provider. The study employs a data set of 1459 observations collected...

It is often argued that engaging in indoor residual spraying (IRS) in areas with high coverage of mosquito bed nets may discourage net ownership and use. This is just a case of a public program inducing perverse incentives. We analyze new data from a randomized control trial conducted in Eritrea...

After years of stagnation and political cataclysms, Georgia tried to recover by launching radical economic and political reforms starting in 2004. The results of the reforms appeared to be impressive. The country's GDP has more than doubled; the total volume of bank deposits is five times what it...

The paper provides a methodology which is suitable for the analysis of the socialcost of disease and the benefits and cost of health intervention by integrating public healthanalysis and economics. The approach developed in the paper is applied to food-bornediarrhea in Rwanda. The results...

This paper exploits rich SOEP microdata to analyze state-level variation in health care utilization in Germany. Unlike most studies in the field of the Small Area Variation (SAV) literature, our approach allows us to net out a large array of individual-level and state-level factors that may...

This paper uses Hierarchical Bayes Models to model and estimate spatial health effects in Germany. We combine rich individual-level household panel data from the German SOEP with administrative county-level data to estimate spatial county-level health dependencies. As dependent variable we use...

Ample empirical evidence links adverse conditions during early childhood (the period from conception to age five) to worse health outcomes and lower academic achievement in adulthood. Can early-life medical care and public health interventions ameliorate these effects? Recent research suggests...