This comprehensive collection brings together more than 50 contributions from some of the most influential researchers in health economics. It authoritatively covers theoretical and empirical issues in health economics, with a balanced range of material on equity and efficiency in health care...

The aim of The Elgar Companion to Health Economics is to take an audience of advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers to the frontier of research in health economics, by providing them with short and easily readable introductions to key topics. The volume brings together 50...

This paper demonstrates that the unobserved heterogeneity commonly assumed to be the source of overdispersion in count data models has predictable implications for the probability structure of such mixture models. In particular, the common observation of excess zeros is a strict implication of...

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...

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...

The misuse of alcoholic beverages ('problem drinking') has been demonstrated to result in enormous economic costs; most of these costs have been shown to be reduced productivity in the labor market. The purpose of this paper is to present sound structural estimates of the relationship between...