Wealthier individuals engage in healthier behavior. This paper seeks to explain this phenomenon by exploiting both inheritances and lottery winnings to test a theory of health behavior. We distinguish between the direct monetary cost and the indirect health cost (value of health lost) of...

In the last year, the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) rose by 11.1% in the United Kingdom (UK), reaching the highest value of the last 40 years. The cost of food suffered an annual increase of 16.2%, which has disproportionally affected fruit and vegetables and has led to food insecurity currently...

Medical Savings Accounts (MSAs) have been controversially debated as an alternative healthcare financing mechanism since the 1970s. Only a few countries adopted MSAs (to different extents) within their healthcare system, e.g. Singapore, China, South Africa, and the US. Proponents argue that MSAs...

This paper is a contribution to the second World Happiness Report. It makes five main points. 1. Mental health is the biggest single predictor of life-satisfaction. This is so in the UK, Germany and Australia even if mental health is included with a six-year lag. It explains more of the variance...

Purpose: Breast cancer is one of the major causes of death incurring highest morbidity and mortality amongst women of Pakistan. The purpose of this study was to assess and compare the role of two public sector tertiary care hospitals' management in reducing out of pocket (OOP) expenses on direct...

In the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments had to rely on Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions in their struggle against the spread of the virus. The stringency of the lockdowns differed across space and time as governments had to adjust their strategy dynamically to the country-specific...

Do healthcare providers pick their patients? This paper uses patient-level administrative data on skilled nursing facilities in California to estimate a structural model of selective admission practices in the nursing home industry. I exploit within-facility covariation between occupancy and...

Even in wealthy economies, access to medicines is increasingly affected by medicine shortages – an issue exacerbated with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of this paper was to examine the extent and nature of medicine shortages in OECD countries (pre-COVID-19) and explore the...

This paper is a contribution to the second World Happiness Report. It makes five main points. 1. Mental health is the biggest single predictor of life-satisfaction. This is so in the UK, Germany and Australia even if mental health is included with a six-year lag. It explains more of the variance...