In the last decades, demographic change coupled with new and expensive medical innovations have put most health care systems in developed countries under financial pressure. Therefore, ensuring efficient service provision is essential for a sustainable health care system. This paper investigates...

The link between education and health is one of the most robust empirical relationships in the social sciences. However, little research has examined the effects of educational quality on health outcomes. We estimate the long run relationship between health behaviors and graduating from a...

This paper estimates the health returns to schooling, using a twin design. For this purpose, I use data on monozygotic twins from the Midlife in the United States survey. The results suggest that completing high school improves health, as measured through self-reported health, chronic...

No prior investigation has considered the effects of state dependence and unobserved heterogeneity on the relationship between regular physical activity (RPA) and latent health stock (LHS). Accounting for state dependence corrects the possible overestimation of the impact of socioeconomic...

Due to regional competition and patient migration, the efficiency of healthcare provision at the regional level is subject to spatial dependence. We address this issue by applying a spatial autoregressive model to longitudinal data from Germany at the district (‘Kreis’) level. The empirical...

These new results imply that attempts to reduce alcohol consumption through price or tax increases will be less effective or more costly than previously claimed. </AbstractSection> Copyright Nelson; licensee Springer. 2013

The prevalence of obesity and overweight has increased in almost all Western countries in the past twenty to thirty years, with social disparities in many of these countries. This paper contributes to the literature on the relation between education and body weight by studying the effect of...

We analyze the contribution of production factors to revenue growth in almost the complete universe of U.S. hospitals, accounting for quality and productivity. Production factors (capital, labor, energy, materials and drugs) contributed 70% (drugs alone contributed 52 %), better health outcomes...