In this paper I examine the characteristics of adults who report on whether they have health care coverage and of people who say that they are unable to see a doctor over the preceding year because of the cost. I make use of a unique data set, the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, a...

The Wisconsin BadgerCare program, which became operational in July 1999, expanded public health insurance eligibility to families with incomes below 185 percent of the U.S poverty line (200 percent for those already enrolled). This eligibility expansion was part of a federal initiative known as...

This study estimates rates of all forms of health insurance coverage for workers aged 18 to 64, by wage quintiles, over the past three decades. This analysis looks at health insurance from any source, while other reports (with rare exceptions) look at only employer-provided health coverage. This...

In this paper, we provide an overview of the health care sector in the Colombian cities of Barranquilla and Cartagena since the mid 2000s. We analyze, from a descriptive approach and by using official sources, the state of health care coverage, the state of the health care service infrastructure...

The Wisconsin BadgerCare program, which became operational in July 1999, expanded public health insurance eligibility to families with incomes below 185 percent of the U.S poverty line (200 percent for those already enrolled). This eligibility expansion was part of a federal initiative known as...

The consequences of tobacco control policies for individual welfare are difficult to assess. We therefore evaluate the impact of smoking bans and cigarette prices on subjective well-being by analyzing data for 40 European countries and regions between 1990 and 2011. We exploit the staggered...

Many papers have been written about people's loss of life satisfaction during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, but not much has been said about their resilience after the first shock had passed. Were people able to return, at least in part, to their original level of life...

This study examines the immediate and intermediate effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the well-being of two high school graduation cohorts (2020 and 2021). We also investigate how changes in well-being at the transition to post-secondary education affect educational plans and outcomes. Our...

Nearly 100 years ago, the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell warned of the social dangers of widespread envy. One view of modern society is that it is systematically developing a set of institutions - such as social media and new forms of advertising - that make people feel...

We study the effects of Massachusetts' healthcare reform on individuals' subjective well-being. Using data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, we find that the reform significantly improved Massachusetts residents' overall life-satisfaction. This result is robust to various...