This paper investigates formation of expected longevity in an elderly popu- lation. We use Italian data from the early (2004) release of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). The SHARE provides a numerical measure for subjective survival probability (SSP). To assess...

Instrumental variables methods (IV) are widely used in the health economics literature to adjust for hidden selection biases in observational studies when estimating treatment effects. Less attention has been paid in the applied literature to the proper use of instrumental variables if treatment...

The General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) is frequently used as a measure of mental well-being with those people with values below a certain threshold regarded as suffering from mental stress. Comparison of mental stress levels across populations may then be sensitive to the chosen threshold. This...

The discernment of relevant factors driving health care utilization constitutes one important research topic in Health Economics. This issue is frequently addressed through specification of regression models for health care use (y – often measured by number of doctor visits) including, among...

This paper considers health-related non-response in the first eleven waves of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and the full eight waves of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) and explores its consequences for dynamic models of the association between socioeconomic status and...

The General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) is frequently used as a measure of mental well-being. A consistent pattern across countries is that women report lower levels of mental well-being, as measured by the GHQ. This paper applies decomposition techniques to Irish data for 1994 and 2000 to...

In 2004 the UK government introduced a new ‘pay for performance’ element into the contract for family doctors (FDs). Its universal introduction with no pre-intervention data is not atypical of system-wide health reform but poses a considerable evaluation challenge. We derive estimates of its...

This paper proposes a new approach to the measurement of inequality and inequity in the delivery of health care based on recent contributions to the literature of poverty and deprivation. This approach has some appealing characteristics that enlarge the scope of inequity analysis: 1) the measure...

This paper investigates gender differences in smoking behavior using data from the German Socio-economic Panel (SOEP). We develop a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition method for count data models which allows to isolate the part of the gender differential in the number of cigarettes daily smoked that...

A copula is best described, as in Joe (1997), as a multivariate distribution function that is used to bind each marginal distribution function to form the joint. The copula parameterises the dependence between the margins, while the parameters of each marginal distribution function can be...