This microeconometric study analyzes the effects of individual leisure sports participation on long-term labour market variables, on socio-demographic as well as on health and subjective well-being indicators for West Germany based on individual data from the German Socio-Economic Panel study...

We study a general equilibrium model where agents' preferences, productivity and labour endowments depend on their health status, and occupational choices affect individual health distributions. Efficiency typically requires agents of the same type to obtain different expected utilities if...

The poorest nations of the world suffer from extreme disease burdens, which go largely untreated because weak incomes and the prevailing system of intellectual property rights fail to provide sufficient incentives to develop new treatments and distribute them at low cost. Recent price reductions...

The value of a statistical life (VSL) is a very controversial topic, but one which is essential to the optimization of governmental decisions. Indeed, our society faces any number of risks (health, transportation, work, etc.) and, as resources are limited, their complete elimination is...

We estimate the harm from smoking during pregnancy upon child birth outcomes, using a rich dataset on a cohort of mothers and their births. We exploit a fixed effects approach to disentangle the correlation between smoking and birth weight from the causal effect. We find that, despite a detailed...

If public funds are allocated efficiently , then an increase in expenditure should improve the performance of substance abuse treatment programs. However, the unconditional correlation between performance and expenditures per patient is non-positive in the data sets used in this paper. One...

This paper compares the cost and quality incentive effects of cost reimbursement and prospective payment systems in the health industru when providers are altuistic. Provider's behavioral rule is governed by a desire to maximize a weighted sum of profit and consumers' health benefit.

"Medicare" has two meanings for Canadians: the entire range of health care services, or only those (mainly physicians and hospitals) mandated and governed by the Canada Health Act (CHA). This paper focuses on the narrower legal meaning of Medicare, as does the recent Alberta proposal to fund...

This paper has attempted to identify characteristic patterns of performance in tax-financed (TF) systems, contrasting them with systems relying more heavily on other revenue sources.

Over the past decade, the 'pharmacoeconomics' phenomenon has incited a stream of commentaries about the economic evaluation of drugs, conflicts of interest and ways of retaining respectability for this component of health economics profession. Private coporations now finance so many aspects of...