We test the causal role of social capital, as measured by self-reported trust, in determining access to basic health facilities in Sub-Saharan Africa. To skirt reverse-causality problems between social capital and basic health, we rely on instrumental variable (IV) estimates. The results show...

In an effort to improve breastfeeding, the Oregon WIC Program tested whether a relatively low-cost telephone peer counseling initiative to support breastfeeding could increase the initiation and duration of exclusive breastfeeding among its participants. They conducted a large randomized field...

Economists think of medical innovation as a valuable but risky good, producing health benefits but increasing financial risk. This perspective overlooks how innovation can lower physical risks borne by healthy patients facing the prospect of future disease. We present an alternative framework...

Preventives are sold ex ante, before disease status is realized, while treatments are sold ex post. Even if the mean of the ex ante distribution of consumer values is the same as that ex post, the shape of the distributions may differ, generating a difference between the surplus each product can...

En este artículo se utiliza la ampliación de la red pública hospitalaria de Barranquilla para evaluar los avances en la accesibilidad geográfica y la equidad en la prestación del servicio de salud. Se emplean medidas de gravedad para calcular la accesibilidad consi­derando restricciones a...

This paper investigates how legal cannabis access affects student performance. Identification comes from an exceptional policy introduced in the city of Maastricht which discriminated legal access based on individuals' nationality. We apply a difference-in-difference approach using...

Several safety-net hospitals have closed in the United States, but the scholarly literature does not adequately explain why. This study examines the relationship between the operational status (open or closed) of safety-net hospitals and unemployment, median household income, gross profit...

In this paper we identify countries that have better outcomes than the United States with respect to life expectancy. Using this sample of countries, relationships between the life expectancy outcomes and health care costs are examined, and we also test whether the extent of public financing has...

The fiscal stimulus of 2009 allocated about $19 billion over five years to advance the country’s push for a nationwide health information network. Information sharing among public health agencies and private health care providers has the potential for reducing public health threats and...

Six-Sigma (SS) is a managerial philosophy used in detecting the error rate of a particular (set) of activities. This research applies six sigma concepts in dealing with troublesome needle-stick events that occurred in a Taiwan hospital. This research integrates several advanced managerial...