It is necessary not only a social or moral approach for health services but an economic approach, too. The economic concepts and tools need to be adapted and adjusted because of particularities of this domain. The laws that are available for health services are very strictly and affect the...

Although product advertising has been widely studied and understood in relation to the consumer’s purchase decision, advertising may also have unintended but important societal and economic consequences. In this paper, we examine a public health outcome — birth rate — associated with...

Disclaimers are widely used by firms to warn customers of dangers and limitations of their products, and are persuasive when the issue is important. We examine the effects of mandatory disclaimers. Speech restrictions conflict with basic economic incentives. Sellers are motivated by profit to...

The government has successfully prosecuted pharmaceutical companies for off-label promotion of drugs, maintaining that such promotion impermissibly undermines the FDA’s pre-market approval process and jeopardizes the public health. In several recent cases, however, pharmaceutical companies...

The Australian Parliament has passed legislation compelling tobacco products to be sold in ?plain packaging?. This paper reviews this legislation and its likely effects on prices, market structure in the tobacco industry and on smoking behaviour. Industry changes following two previous sets of...

The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act of 2009 requires the display of graphic health warnings on cigarette advertising and packaging in the United States. Debates over the permissibility of these new mandated health warnings under the unusually broad Free Speech Clause of the...

Labeling and information disclosure to support consumer choice are often proposed as attractive policy alternatives to onerous mandatory business regulation. This article argues that choices available to consumers are constructed and constrained by actors in the chains of production,...

This article sets forth the argument that college administrators must adopt a more uniform policy about alcohol use. Part I of this article describes college student alcohol use and the efforts made by college administrators to discourage students from binge and underage drinking. Part II...

Using panel data for a cross-section of countries, several previous studies estimate the effect of advertising bans on cigarette consumption. These studies suffer from three general problems: (1) structural change in cigarette demand functions; (2) endogeneity of advertising bans; and (3)...

The Australian Parliament has passed legislation compelling tobacco products to be sold in “plain packaging”. This paper reviews this legislation and its likely effects on prices, market structure in the tobacco industry and on smoking behaviour. Industry changes following two previous sets...