Scholars have long recognized the difficulties of communicating risk to the public. The rise of mobile gaming presents unprecedented opportunities for risk communicators to reach millions of potential users in engaging and potentially effective ways. Gamifying risk communication may help users...

Once a humble, beloved, charity-based arm of the healthcare industry, hospice is now a multi-billion dollar industry, funded almost exclusively by Medicare, run by for-profit corporations answering to private equity investors and Wall Street, and more and more frequently plagued by fraud and...

Background: The Dutch national breast cancer screening program invites women aged 50-75 for screening. By detecting the disease in an early phase, the program aims to achieve lower breast cancer mortality and improve breast cancer survivors' health. Arguably, the latter also improves the...

A recent debate in the medical literature has arisen around the mortality effects of obesity. Whereas it has been argued that the obese die younger, the data that have become available do not immediately support this. This potentially undermines the hypothesis that modern life with its physical...

In this paper, I examine the impact of uninsured patients on the health of the insured, focusing on one health outcome - the in-hospital mortality rate of insured heart attack patients. I employ panel data models using patient discharge and hospital financial data from California (1999-2006). My...

The social changes in Poland over the last two decades have had an impact on many dimensions of life, including on important elements of human capital, such as health and functional and instrumental daily activities. This article contains an overview of the available data and indicators on...

There has been a widespread displacement of coal by natural gas as space heating and cooking technology in Turkey in the last two decades, triggered by the deployment of natural gas networks. In this paper, we examine the impact of this development on mortality among adults and the elderly. Our...

We study the effect of birth weight on long-run outcomes, including permanent income, income across various stages of the lifecycle, education, social benefits take-up, and adult mortality. For this purpose, we have linked a unique dataset on nearly all Swedish twins born between 1926-1958,...

Does austerity in healthcare affect health and healthcare outcomes? We examine the intended and unintended effects of the Italian austerity policy Piano di Rientro aimed at containing the cost of the healthcare sector. Using an instrumental variable strategy that exploits the temporal and...

In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, among other previous "non-pharmaceutical interventions'', on March 22, 2020 the Italian Government imposed an economic lockdown and ordered the closing of all non-essential economic activities. This paper estimates the causal effect of this measure on...