The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic placed health-care systems around the world under great stress. The sharp increase in demand for health care highlighted the importance of efficient health spending. The negative impact of the pandemic on global economic growth further strengthened the...

In this paper we empirically analyze the effect of the vaccinations against the SARS-CoV-2 virus on the Covid-19 pandemic for European countries from February 2021 to February 2022 with weekly data. We perform panel fixed effects estimations, GMM estimations and nonlinear penalized spline...

When other measures for economic welfare are scarce or unreliable, the body mass index (BMI) is a biological measure that reflects current net nutrition. This study uses a difference-in-decompositions framework to analyze how women's BMIs varied with the advent of early 20th century social...

When other measures for economic welfare are scarce or unreliable, the use of biological measures are now standard in economics. This study uses late 19th and early 20th century BMI, statures, and weight to assess how net nutrition accumulated to women and men during US economic development....

Communities urbanize when the net benefits to urbanization exceed rural areas. Body mass, height, and weight are biological welfare measures that reflect the net difference between calories consumed and calories required for work and to withstand the physical environment. Across the United...

When other measures for material conditions are scarce or unreliable, the use of height is now common to evaluate economic conditions during economic development. However, throughout US economic development, height data by gender have been slow to emerge. Throughout the late 19th and early 20th...

A population’s average stature reflects cumulative net nutrition and changing long-run economic conditions facing women’s economic opportunity, inequality, and net nutrition during development. This study uses stature as a measure for cumulative net nutrition to show how female and male...

Countries have employed a variety of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) in order to curtail the Covid-19 pandemic. However, the success of individual measures in reducing the number of infections remains controversial. This paper exploits a panel data set of 182 countries to estimate the...

Health expenditure data almost always include extreme values, implying that the underlying distribution has heavy tails. This may result in infinite variances as well as higher-order moments and bias the commonly used least squares methods. To accommodate extreme values, we propose an estimation...

The measures imposed by the governments to stop the spreading of SARS-CoV-2 virus, especially those referring to the mandatory character of physical distancing, determined more and more organizations to introduce teleworking, starting with March 2020. This paper analyses the factors that...