In this study I use improved data of fiscal decentralization to re-examine the hypothesis that shifts towards more fiscal decentralization would be accompanied by improvements in population health on a panel of 19 OECD countries. The advantage of the new measure of decentralization is that it...

When a treatment in difference in differences (DD) is applied to a group of individuals with a time-constant qualifiÂ…cation/eligibility such as gender or race, there is no issue of choosing to be (un-)treated. But if the qualiÂ…fication is time-varying, then the individuals may alter...

There is a persistent association between health and portfolio choice, but hardly anything is known about the underlying sources of heterogeneity: what makes healthier individuals hold more risky assets? This paper uses rich Dutch longitudinal data to take into account and explain unobserved...

The ECHP is used to analyse the utilisation of health care in Europe. We estimate a new latent class hurdle model for panel data and compare it with the latent class NegBin model and the standard hurdle model. Latent class specifications outperform the standard hurdle model but the latent class...

Body mass index (BMI), weight(kg)/ height(m)2, is a widely used measure for obesity in medical science. In economics, there appeared studies (e.g., Cawley (2004) and Burkhauser and Cawley (2008)) showing that BMI has a negative (or no) effect on wage. But BMI is a tightly specified function of...

This paper explores reporting bias and heterogeneity in the measure of self-assessed health (SAH) used in the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). The ninth wave of the BHPS includes the SF-36 general health questionnaire, which incorporates a different wording to the self-assessed health...

This paper investigates the persistence in health limitations for individuals within the member states of the European Union. We use the full 8 waves of data available in the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) to explore the relative contributions of state dependence, unobserved...

This paper analyzes the effect of dental insurance on utilization of general dentist services by adult US population aged from 25 to 64 years. Our econometric framework accommdates endogeneity of insurance and the ordered nature of the measure of dental utilization. The study finds strong...

We measure socioeconomic inequalities in health across European Union Member States between 1994 and 2001. The analysis is based on the European Community Household Panel Users’ Database (ECHP-UDB) and uses two binary indicators of health limitations for the full 8 waves of available data....

This paper evaluates the impact of the introduction of global budgeting on dentists’ activity in Taiwan using a unique and rich panel dataset that was created specifically for the task. The panel data for 4424 dentists over 48 months, January 1997 to December 2000, was drawn from the BNHI’s...