This study estimates the impact of an American rural public health program on child mortality over 1908 to 1933. Due to the absence of sanitation and childoriented health services outside of urban areas, public and private agencies sponsored county-level health departments (CHDs) throughout the US. Variation in the location and timing of the CHDs identifies improvements in population health, wh...

We present a hospital non-price competition model to investigate two important concerns when a global budgeting system is applied to the expenditure cap policy and the expenditure target policy. Our results indicate that (1) the treadmill effect, (describing a phenomenon whereby health care providers provide more health care services with a lower reimbursed price under the expenditure cap polic...

This paper estimates the intangible benefits of a two sports facilities in Columbus, Ohio on residential property values. We estimate a spatial hedonic model that avoids biased and inconsistent estimates in the presence of uncorrected spatial autocorrelation. The results suggest that the presence of sports facilities in Columbus have a significant positive distance-decaying effect on surroundin...

We examine in controlled experiments how individuals make choices when faced with multiple options. The choice tasks mimic the selection of health insurance, prescription drug, or retirement savings plans. However, in our experiment, the available options can be objectively ranked. We find that the probability of a person selecting the optimal option declines as the number of options increases,...

When attempting to measure gun ownership in the United States, the problem of missing administrative data arises, making it necessary to find a valid proxy. Several such proxies are employed in economic studies, one of which is the fraction of “suicides by firearm” of “all suicides” (FSS). My work validates this proxy from out-of-sample data, namely, Austrian administrative data on firearm lice...

This paper estimates the effect of informal care provision on female caregiver’s health. We use data from the German Socio-economic Panel and assess effects up to seven years after care provision. A simulation-based sensitivity analysis scrutinizes the sensitivity of the results with respect to potential deviations from the conditional independence assumption in the regression adjusted matching...

Most systems of health care financing in EU member states currently include elements of income redistribution. The paper analyzes the effects of shifting this kind of redistribution to the tax system and argues that this reform could create two types of efficiency gains. On the expenditure side, it would facilitate the adoption of more incentive-compatible insurance contracts, for example throu...

Abstract It is commonly known that irresponsible alcohol use can have adverse effects. For some people, it results in health problems, for others productivity loss, and experience the worst possible outcome of misuse – death. This paper estimates effect reduced sales hours on alcohol-attributable mortality (AAM) Estonia. Using novel data from 1997 to 2015, this analyzes policies at both county ...

We consider lifetime health insurance contracts in which ageing provisions are used to smooth the premium profile. The capital stock accumulated for each individual can be decomposed into two parts: a premium insurance and an annuitised life insurance, only the latter being transferable between insurers without triggering premium changes through risk segmentation. In a simulation based on Germa...

In many health care systems primary care physicians act as ‘gatekeepers’ to secondary care. We investigates the impact of the UK fundholding scheme under which general practices could elect to hold a budget to meet the costs of elective surgery for their patients. We use a differences in differences methodology on a large four year panel of English general practices before and after the aboliti...