Two related issues in public policy with respect to alcohol are how increased availability influences consumption and what effect excess consumption has on individual health outcomes. This paper examines one particular source of variation in availability, bar opening hours, and how this influences consumption, physical and mental health. We focus on the extension of opening hours in England and...

We use a Principal-Agent framework to evaluate the economic impacts of imposing a tax on insurance payment in presence of moral hazard using a Gamma conditional distribution of losses. Our results show that any tax paid by the insured would the lower his effort to prevent loss, hence increasing insurance payments and decreasing pro ts. This result is reinforced as the insured becomes more risk ...

We analytically characterize the effects of ownership and competition in the health care industry on quality provision, market coverage and optimal co-payment policy. A private monopoly selects a lower quality than a public supplier, and the socially optimal co-payment rate with a private monopoly exceeds that with a public monopoly. We establish that the optimal co-payment policy is invariant ...

The dynamics of drinking and driving can be adequately described using the fraction of accidents involving drivers who had been drinking. Evaluating drunk driving legislation using this measure implicitly controls for unobservable “general risk” influences on traffic safety, reducing bias and variability in estimates of laws’ effects, especially in the early studies that influence lawmakers mos...

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...