Reference price regimes for prescription drugs are usually implemented with the aim of curbing public expenditure with pharmaceuticals, induce drug substitution from branded to generics drugs and enhance competition. In these systems, patients co-pay the difference between the drug's pharmacy...

We investigate the association between age and medical spending in the U.S. using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS). We estimate a partially linear seminonparametric model and construct "pure" life-cycle profiles of health spending simultaneously controlling for time effects...

In this paper we construct life-cycle profiles of U.S. health care spending using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS). We separate pure age effects on health expenditure from time effects (i.e. productivity effects, business cycle effects, etc.) and cohort effects (i.e. initial...

In this study, the causal nexus between child mortality rate, fertility rate, GDP, household final consumption expenditure, and food production index in Ghana was investigated spanning from 1971 to 2013 using the Autoregressive and Distributed Lag (ARDL) method. The study tested for unit root,...

To combat growing levels of obesity, health related taxes have been suggested with taxes on foods high in fat or sugar. Such taxes have been criticised on the basis of their regressivity and potentially adverse impact upon poverty. This paper analyses the effect of such taxes on a range of...

This paper investigates the effect of price variations on the diet composition in Britain. It describes the dynamics of food demand in relation to food prices over time using data from the British National Food Survey (NFS) covering the period 1975-2000. Demand elasticities with respect to price...

This paper uses transaction-level customer data from the largest bank in Denmark to estimate the change in consumer spending caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting shutdown of the Danish economy. We find that aggregate spending was on average 27% below the counterfactual level without...

As households shop less frequently, food decay makes perishable food consumption more costly. Therefore, I hypothesize that shopping frequency is an important factor of household food choice. I test this hypothesis using an instrumental variables approach on a system of equations using household...

Objective: To identify how consumption of 12 goods – alcohol, cigarettes, fast food, items sold at vending machines, purchases of food away from home, cookies, cakes, chips, candy, donuts, bacon, and carbonated soft drinks – varies across the income distribution by calculating their...

This paper examines the evolution of drug use in Colombia over the past years. Our analysis, based on surveys from the Dirección Nacional de Estupefacientes, shows that drug consumption grew substantially between 1996 and 2013. The growth occurred for both genders, all ages, socioeconomic...