This paper presents a life cycle model for the demand for health, and derives empirical specifications that distinguish between permanent and transitory wage responses. Using panel data, we estimate dynamic health and health input demand equations. We find evidence of negative transitory wage...

The recent explosive growth of managed health care has occurred in large part because of a recognition that we need to make cost-benefit trade-offs in health care. Managed care plans typically make cost-benefit trade-offs by giving plan physicians financial incentives to reduce medical spending...

In this paper, we address the issue of spurious correlation in the production of health in a systematic way. Spurious correlation entails the risk of linking health status to medical (and nonmedical) inputs when no links exist. This note first presents the bounds testing procedure as a method to...

After reviewing over 300 published papers on frontier efficiency measurement, the techniques used are mainly non-parametric data envelopment analysis based, but there is increasing use of parametric techniques, such as stochastic frontier analysis. Applications both to hospitals and wider health...

Understanding of the substantial disparity in health between socioeconomic status (SES) groups is hampered by the lack of a sufficiently comprehensive theoretical framework to interpret empirical facts and to predict yet untested relations. Motivated by the observation that medical care explains...