Introduction: Common approaches in cost-effectiveness analyses do not adjust for confounders. In nonrandomized studies this can result in biased results. Parametric models such as regression models are commonly applied to adjust for confounding, but there are several issues which need to be...

Health related data with discrete ordered dependent variables are often characterised by excessive 'zero' observations that may relate to two distinct data generating processes. For example, there may be a large proportion of 'no visit' in modeling discrete ordered levels of health service uses...

In recent years there has been a large scientific and public debate on climate change and its direct as well as indirect effects on human health. According to World Health Organization WHO, 2006), some 2.5 million people die every year from non-infectious diseases directly attributable to...

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 directs over $7 billion to expand broadband Internet availability and adoption in the United States. One target of such funding is the elderly population, a group of Americans for which broadband adoption is relatively low. An interesting...

This paper proposes a joint model of tobacco consumption and mortality over the life-cycle. The decision to smoke is a trade off between current utility derived from smoking and a mortality risk increasing with age. Thus, individuals with a shorter potential life expectancy have less incentive...

Alcohol taxation is an important policy instrument for correcting for market failures associated with excessive alcohol consumption. This paper examines the beverage-specific negative externalities by providing empirical evidence linking ten alcohol beverage types to drink driving and hazardous,...

This paper examines evidence from Australia on the factors associated with binge drinking and several alcohol-related antisocial and unlawful behaviours. In particular, to quantify the negative externalities of excessive alcohol consumption by product type, our primary focus is the link with...

Global budgeting sets a predetermined cap to restrain health expenditure, but the fixed budget for medical providers could result in less efficient services. This paper measures hospital efficiency under global budgeting using simultaneous stochastic frontier analysis, stressing that physicians...

This study empirically estimated the long-run and short-run impact of federal government human capital spending on human capital development in Nigeria. The study was motivated by the fact that despite growth in public spending in the past decade Nigeria still ranks low in human capital...

Measures of mental wellbeing are heavily relied upon to identify at-risk individuals. However, self-reported mental health metrics might be unduly affected by mis-reporting (perhaps stemming from stigma effects). In this paper we consider this phenomenon using data from the British Household...