Cost-Sharing and Use of Health Services in Italy: Evidence from a Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design* We use a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) to evaluate the impact of cost-sharing on the use of health services. In the Italian health system, individuals reaching age 65 and earning low incomes are given total exemption from cost-sharing for health services consumption. Since the probab...

Community Effects on Elderly Health: Evidence from CHARLS National Baseline There is increasing interest in neighborhood or area effects on health and individual development. China, due to its vast regional variations in health infrastructure and geography and relative immobility of older residents, provides a rare opportunity to study such effects. Utilizing China Health and Retirement Longitu...

This paper investigates whether new health information aff ects smoking behavior. Interpreting three distinct categories of health events as diff erent information, the paper also tests whether behavioral change depends on the type of information received. Based on retrospectively reported data on smoking behavior from the Swiss Household Panel, a linear probability model is applied to estimate...

Quality report cards addressing information asymmetry in the health care market have become a popular strategy used by policymakers to improve the quality of care for elderly. Using individual level data from the largest German sickness fund merged with institutional level data, we examine the relationship between nursing home quality, as measured by recently introduced report cards, nursing ho...

Using administrative panel data of health insurants, we estimate the effects of low birth weight on health service utilization among children and young adults between birth and 21 years old. To account for time-invariant heterogeneity of mothers, we use sibling fixedeffects estimation. We find that low birth weight strongly increases subsequent health expenditures and that the effect is particu...

Employees exposed to high involvement management (HIM) practices have higher subjective wellbeing, fewer accidents but more short absence spells than “like” employees not exposed to HIM. These results are robust to extensive work, wage and sickness absence history controls. We highlight the possibility of higher short-term absence in the presence of HIM because it is more demanding than standar...

This paper estimates the eff ect of informal care provision on female caregiver’s health. We use data from the German Socio-economic Panel and assess eff ects 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 matchi...

The transition from Millennium Development Goals to Sustainable Development Goals has substantially shifted the policy debate from development to inclusive development. Using interactive quantile regressions, we examine the correlations between mobile banking and inclusive development (quality of growth, inequality and poverty) among individuals in 93 developing countries for the year 2011. Mob...

Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have passed laws that allow individuals to use marijuana for medical purposes. In this paper, I use marijuana possession arrests and treatment referrals by medical professionals to estimate the impact of medical marijuana laws on marijuana usage among non-patients. I find that these laws increase marijuana arrests among adult males by about 20%. The...

Drawing on insights from household production theory and using data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey, this paper seeks to provide the first estimates of the causal effect of maternal employment on the obesity status of older children in the Australian and international literatures. To achieve this aim, proxy variables, sibling-differences and instrumental varia...