Most working-age Americans obtain health insurance coverage through the workplace. U.S. law requires employers that offer health plans to use a price common to all in the group, but the value of insurance to each risk-averse individual varies with their idiosyncratic health risk. Hence, linking employment and health insurance creates a wedge between the marginal cost and benefit of insurance. S...

Economic Conditions and Child Abuse Although a huge literature spanning several disciplines documents an association between poverty and child abuse, researchers have not found persuasive evidence that economic downturns increase abuse, despite their impacts on family income. In this paper, we address this seeming contradiction. Using county-level child abuse data spanning 1996 to 2009 from the...

We propose a new non-linear regression model for rating dependent variables. The rating scale model accounts for the upper and lower bounds of ratings. Parametric and semi-parametric estimation is discussed. An application investigates the relationship between stated health satisfaction and physical and mental health scores derived from self-reports of various health impairments, using data fro...

IZA DP No. 10589 FebruAry 2017 The Lasting Legacy of Seasonal Influenza: In-Utero Exposure and Labor Market Outcomes* Pregnancy conditions have been shown to matter for later economic success, but many threats to fetal development that have been identified are difficult to prevent. In this paper I study seasonal influenza, a preventable illness that comes around every year and causes strong inf...

Mental Health and Labour Market Participation: Evidence from IV Panel Data Models A large body of empirical research links mental health and labour market outcomes; however, there are few studies that effectively control for the two-way causality between work and health and the existence of unobserved individual characteristics that might jointly determine health and labour market outcomes. In ...

Does More Money Make You Fat? The Effects of Quasi-Experimental Income Transfers on Adolescent and Young Adult Obesity This paper examines how exogenous income transfers during adolescence affect contemporaneous body mass index (BMI) measures and young adult obesity rates using evidence from the Great Smoky Mountains Study of Youth. The effects of extra income differ depending on the households...

The role of health in economic development is tested using three empirical approaches: a direct labour productivity effect, an interactive effect, and an incentive effect. Using proxies for health such as access to sanitation facility, clean water, immunisation, and adult male mortality, higher levels of health are hypothesised to promote higher economic growth as healthier workers are more pro...

Health state utility data generated using the EQ-5D instrument are typically right bounded at one with a substantial gap to the next set of observations, left bounded by some negative value, and are multi modal. These features present challenges to the estimation of the e¤ect of clinical and socioeconomic characteristics on health utilities. We present an adjusted censored model and then use th...

Economic Behavior under Alcohol Influence: An Experiment on Time, Risk, and Social Preferences We report results from an incentivized laboratory experiment to provide controlled evidence on the causal effects of alcohol consumption on risk preferences, time perception and altruism. Our design allows disentangling the pharmacological effects of alcohol intoxication from those mediated by expecta...

The article examines the question of whether the current account deficits seen in selected transition economies in recent years mainly as a symptom of the dynamic economic activity of the catching-up process are a source of potential macroeconomic destabilisation. Given the possible significant reduction of capital flows, as well as restrictions and lessons from recent financial crises, current...