A vast literature on public pensions shows that pay-as-you-go schemes may be preferable to funded schemes despite arguments of return dominance. A heavily cited reason for this is redistribution. One aspect that is rarely considered, however, is that the positive correlation between income and...

This paper studies the impact of financial crises on society. Using data on 187 banking crises in 126 countries over the period 1970-2009, I examine the impact of a crisis not only on the economy and the financial sector, but also on health, education, poverty, and gender issues. A wider-angle...

Analysis of the dynamics of lending and household deposits allows to find interesting models of consumer behaviour from the perspective of consumption and savings balance. They fit into four provisional, sequentially alternating types of population's activity, which often depend on the number...

Burnout of physicians and other medical personnel is a major problem in the economics of healthcare systems, potentially costing billions of dollars. Knowledge of the determinants and costs of burnout at the organization level is sparse, making it difficult to assess the net benefits of...

Analysis of an original nationwide Internet survey reveals that health-related behavior shows associations with three aspects of time discounting: (i) impatience, measured by the overall discount rate; (ii) present bias, measured by the degree of declining impatience in the generalized hyperbolic...

This short essay reviews Gary Becker's contributions and influence in health economics. It was originally prepared for the collection of short papers in honor of Gary Becker that is scheduled to appear in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Demographic Economics.

Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are currently the leading cause of death worldwide. In this paper, we examine the channels through which economic growth affects NCDs' epidemiology. Following a production function approach, we develop a basic technique to break up the impact of economic growth...

This paper aims to unravel the competing effects of the health investment. It explores, both analytically and numerically, the equilibrium shift and transitional dynamics after a one-time policy of health investment. We find that such a policy improves health status in the long run, but harms...

This paper formulates and estimates a dynamic model of health, addiction, education, and wealth in order to understand the well-established positive empirical relationship between education and health. In our model, agents make decisions on schooling, consumption of addictive goods, and...

This chapter reviews the existing empirical evidence on how social insurance affects health. Social insurance encompasses programs primarily designed to insure against health risks, such as health insurance, sick leave insurance, accident insurance, long-term care insurance and disability...