Tobacco consumption, as well as the consumption of any other psychoactive substances, lead to addictions, which is a serious problem that modern societies have to face. To reduce the negative consequences of nicotine consumption and to provide sustainable development, many governments, in both...

Excessive consumption of alcoholic beverages causes addiction, damages people’s health and has disrupting social and family consequences. Given that, many countries impose other taxes on these products in addition to sales tax. The ways to apply these taxes are different, however, they are...

This paper studies the relationship between Colombia's legal cigarette sales, smuggling, and tobacco taxes. Exploring first the impact taxes have on legal and illegal cigarettes, we find that taxes correlate negatively to legal sales and positively with illicit sales. Second, estimating a demand...

In a recent article which appeared in this journal, Hoel and Saeter propose a model showing that welfare may be improved by introducing delay in public health care. In this note we argue that their model may be used as starting point because of their stringent assumptions. We suggest that the...

We consider an economy where most of the health care is publicly provided,and where there is waiting time for several types of treatments. Privatehealth care without waiting time is an option for the patients in the publichealth queue. We show that although patients with low waiting costs...

A fat and a healthy good provide immediate gratification, and cause health costs or benefits in the long run, which are misperceived. Additionally, the fat good (healthy good) increases (decreases) health care costs by increasing (decreasing) the probability of suffering from a chronic disease...

A fat and a healthy good provide immediate gratification, and cause health costs or benefits in the long run, which are misperceived. Additionally, the fat good (healthy good) increases (decreases) health care costs by increasing (decreasing) the probability of suffering from a chronic disease...

Taxing food and soft drinks in the name of obesity is not a new idea. Dozens of jurisdictions have experimented with such taxes over the years, allowing economists to study their impact. The results have consistently showed the following: demand for sugary drinks, snacks and fatty foods is...