Appreciating how propensities to be immunized against the flu depend on individual characteristics and environments is essential if policies regarding influenza control are to be sensibly formulated. Beyond epidemiology, there are some important economic issues that must be addressed if the...

The economic costs of adverse health outcomes have typically been evaluated in a context of risk neutrality, an approach that ignores the potential welfare importance of individuals' risk preferences. This paper presents a framework that unifies the research in health capital and earnings with...

Various health-, quality-, and disability-adjusted life year or life expectancy (HALY, QALY, DALY; HALE, QALE, DALE) measures have become gold standards for defining outcomes in technology evaluation, population health monitoring, and other evaluative efforts. As such, it is critical that the...

We find that alcoholism decreases labor force participation among prime age males, and therefore decreases the income of this group. The effects of alcoholism on the labor force participation of younger and older males and on the wage rates of prime age males are not significantly positive. We...

Data on health care expenditures, length of stay, utilization of health services, consumption of unhealthy commodities, etc. are typically characterized by: (a) nonnegative outcomes; (b) nontrivial fractions of zero outcomes in the population (and sample); and (c) positively-skewed distributions...

In applied econometric work, analysts are concerned often with estimation of and inferences about interaction effects, e.g. 'Does the magnitude of the effect of z1 on y depend on z2? ' This paper develops tests for and proper interpretation of various forms of interaction effects in one...

In health economics applications involving outcomes (y) and covariates (x), it is often the case that the central inferential problems of interest involve E[y|x] and its associated partial effects or elasticities. Many such outcomes have two fundamental statistical properties: yò0; and the...

Practitioners of empirical health economics might be forgiven for paying little heed to the recent 50th anniversary of the publication of one of the most important papers in its methodological heritage: James Tobin's widely-cited 1958 Econometrica paper that developed what later became known as...

Although individuals are all endowed with the same time budgets, time use patterns differ owing to heterogeneity in preferences and constraints. In today's health policy arena there is considerable discussion about how to improve health outcomes by increasing levels of physical activity. In this...

Practitioners of empirical health economics might be forgiven for paying little heed to the recent 50th anniversary of the publication of one of the most important papers in its methodological heritage: James Tobin's widely-cited 1958 Econometrica paper that developed what later became known as...