Over the early twentieth century, urban centers adopted full-time public health departments. We show that opening full-time administration had little observable impact on mortality. We then attempt to determine why health departments were ineffective. Our results suggest that achievements in...

The comparison of Mexico’s 2009 A/H1N1 outbreak with the U.S. H1N1 outbreak of 1976 provides notable observations—based on the strengths and weaknesses of each country’s response—that can be used as a starting point of discussion for the design of effective Emerging Infectious Diseases...

We analyze the impact of the original means-tested Old Age Assistance (OAA) programs on the health of the elderly prior to the first Social Security pension payments. Before 1935 a number of states had enacted their own OAA laws. After 1935 the federal government began offering matching grants...

This paper constructs a simple overlapping generations model to examine how the choice of public and private health expenditure is affected by preferences and economic factors under majority voting. In the model,agents with heterogeneous income decide how much to consume, save, and invest in...

The study argues that potential savings from efficiency could be effective alternative to increasing health system financing in SSA. Health system efficiency estimates were derived from the Data Envelopment Analysis and Stochastic Frontier Analysis and used to compute potential gains from...