This paper investigates the short-term effects of public smoking bans on individual smoking behavior. In 2007 and 2008, state-level smoking bans were gradually introduced in all of Germany’s sixteen federal states. We exploit this variation in the timing of state bans to identify the effect that smoke-free policies had on individuals’ smoking propensity and smoking intensity. Using rich longitu...

Several studies suggest that, on the basis of life expectancy (LE) regressions, new pharmaceutical drugs are responsible for some of the marked gains in LE observed over the last 50 years. We critically appraise these studies. We point out several modeling issues, including disentangling the contribution of new drugs from advances in disease management, changes in the distribution of health car...

Bans on retail tobacco displays, of the type proposed by New York’s Mayor Bloomberg in March 2013, have been operative in several economies since 2001. Despite an enormous number of studies in public health journals using attitudinal data, we can find no population-based econometric studies of the type normally used in Economics. This paper attempts to fill that gap by using data from the annua...

Child Care Subsidies and Childhood Obesity Child care subsidies play a critical role in facilitating the transition of disadvantaged mothers from welfare to work. However, little is known about the influence of these policies on children’s health and well-being. In this paper, we study the impact of subsidy receipt on lowincome children’s weight outcomes in the fall and spring of kindergarten. ...

We provide evidence for effects of a large scale intervention that focuses on quality of nutritional and child-care inputs during the early stages of life. Our empirical strategy uses a combination of double difference and weighting estimators in a longitudinal survey to address the purposive placement of participating communities and estimate the effect of the availability of the program at th...

Using the recent excise tax increases at the state-level in the United States from 2000 to 2010, I estimate two-way fixed effects models of older adult smoking participation. I find that a one dollar increase in the excise tax reduces smoking participation by 2.5 percent for adults age 30 to 74. An investigation of the age distribution finds that results are sensitive to how older adult age gro...

There is a paucity of literature concerning the relation between the resource utilization decisions of the salaried hospital based physician and patient outcomes in a national health service. The purpose of our study is to model and test hospital production where the major decision makers are physicians. We view the outcome process of the hospital as a change in the distribution function over f...

There is ample evidence of widespread inefficiency in health care systems. This paper aims to estimate relative efficiency of health care systems across all EU countries. The paper uses a comprehensive battery of models with different combinations of input and output variables. Outputs are the commonly reported health outcome indicators, such as life expectancy, healthy life expectancy and amen...

This paper investigates the short-term effects of public smoking bans on individual smoking behavior. In 2007 and 2008, state-level smoking bans were gradually introduced in all of Germany’s sixteen federal states. We exploit this variation in the timing of state bans to identify the effect that smoke-free policies had on individuals’ smoking propensity and smoking intensity. Using rich longitu...

Does Medicaid Coverage for Pregnant Women Affect Prenatal Health Behaviors?* Despite plausible mechanisms, little research has evaluated potential changes in health behaviors as a result of the Medicaid expansions of the 1980s and 1990s. In this paper, we provide the first national study of the effects of Medicaid on health behaviors for pregnant women, which is a group of particular interest g...