This paper investigates the impact of the public smoking ban which came into effect in Italy on January 2005 on individual smoking behaviour. Current empirical evidence supports the existence of a negative effect of the Italian ban on smoking prevalence and consumption in the general population....

If two partners smoke, their quit behavior may be related through correlation in unobserved individual characteristics and common external shocks. However, there may also be a causal effect whereby the quit behavior of one partner is affected by the quit decision of the other partner. We use...

The paper will attempt to estimate factors which determine the variability of case fatality rates of COVID-19 (Coronavirus) across OECD countries in the recent time. The objective of the paper is to estimate the impact of government health policies on fatality rates (Case fatality rates) of...

In light of the recent rise in childhood obesity, the School Breakfast Program (SBP) and National School Lunch Program (NSLP) have received renewed attention, despite the fact that they have existed for decades. The SBP, in particular, is viewed as a potentially important component of any policy...

We empirically investigate the determinants of local authority mental health expenditure in England. We adopt a reduced form demand and supply model, extended to incorporate possible interaction among authorities, as well as unobserved spatial heterogeneity. The model is estimated using an...

Using the 1997-1998 New South Wales public-hospitals comparison data, we investigate the hospital-level inefficiency by applying a stochastic-frontier multiproduct cost function. We use a flexible translog cost function to reduce the measurement errors of the outputs of the hospital. The main...

We consider panel parametric, semi-parametric and nonparametric methods of constructing counterfactuals. We show through extensive simulations that no method is able to dominate other methods in all circumstances. Since the true data generating process is typically unknown. We therefore also...

This study investigates the short-term mortality effects of two age-based restrictions on legal access to alcohol in Germany. We exploit sharp differences in legal access to alcohol at 16 and 18 years by implementing a regression discontinuity design. We find discontinuous increases in deaths at...

In 2019, U.S. pharmaceutical companies paid $3.6 billion to physicians in the form of gifts to promote their drugs. The practice of offering financial incentives has raised concerns about potential conflict of interest. To curb such inappropriate financial relationships between healthcare...

The design of incentive schemes that improve quality of care is a central issue for the healthcare sector. Nowadays we observe many pay-for-performance programs, where payment is contingent on meeting indicators of provider effort, but also other alternative strategies have been introduced, for...