Early life conditions have been linked to various domains of later life health, including cardiovascular outcomes. Using life history data from 13 European countries, I find that childhood socioeconomic status and measures of childhood health are related to hypertension, although there is cross...

This paper proposes a new method of measuring obesity using Body Mass Index (BMI) data. Conventional measures which simply count the number of individuals with BMI in excess of an upper limit ignore the extent by which individuals exceed BMI limits and also the increased risk ratios for various...

There is a well-established debate between Heckman sample selection and two-part models in health econometrics, particularly when no obvious exclusion restrictions are available. Most of this debate has focussed on the application of these models to health care expenditure. This paper revisits...

Various panel models were presented to resolve the ranking of global health care systems according to efficiency. However, in terms of the spatial distribution of statistical units, spatial dependence as a result of various forms of spatial interactions caused biased estimators in classical...

This note extends the theory of optimal aging and death (Dalgaard and Strulik, 2010) towards uncertain death. Specifically, it is assumed that at any age the probability to survive depends on the number of health deficits accumulated. It is shown that the results in Dalgaard and Strulik (2011)...

This study presents a novel view on education and health behavior of individuals constrained by aging bodies. The aging process, i.e. the accumulation of health deficits over time, is built on recent insights from gerontology. The loss of body functionality, which eventually leads to death, can...

We hypothesize that the timing of the fertility transition is an important determinant of comparative physiological development. In support, we provide a model of long-run growth, which elucidates the links between population size, average body size and income during development....

In the present paper we advance a theory of pre-industrial growth where body size and population size are endogenously determined. Despite the fact that parents invest in both child quantity and productivity enhancing child quality, a take-off does not occur due to a key physiological check: if...

The discussion about health care systems focuses on the dynamics of expenditures and on the weak growth of the revenue base. In this discussion it is widely overseen that medical expenditures and supply of medical services crucially depend on the compensation of physician services. The paper...

The importance of the physician-patient relationship for the health care market is beyond controversy. Recent work emphasizes a two-sided asymmetric information relationship between physician and patient. In contrast to most work looking only at the physician's perspective, our paper...