Do Public Health Interventions Crowd Out Private Health Investments? Malaria Control Policies in Eritrea It is often argued that engaging in indoor residual spraying (IRS) in areas with high coverage of mosquito bed nets may discourage net ownership and use. This is just a case of a public program inducing perverse incentives. We analyze new data from a randomized control trial conducted in Eri...

We develop a pair of risk measures for the universe of health and longevity products that includes life insurance, annuities, and supplementary health insurance. Health delta measures the differential payoff that a policy delivers in poor health, while mortality delta measures the differential payoff that a policy delivers at death. Optimal portfolio choice simplifies to the problem of choosing...

International Differences in Longevity and Health and Their Economic Consequences In 1975, 50 year-old Americans could expect to live slightly longer than their European counterparts. By 2005, American life expectancy at that age has diverged substantially compared to Europe. We find that this growing longevity gap is primarily the symptom of real declines in the health of near-elderly American...

We model asymmetric information arising from physician agency, and its effect on the design of payment and health care quantity. The physician-patient coalition aims to maximize a combination of physician profit and patient benefit. The degree of substitution between profit and patient benefit in the physician-patient coalition is the physician’s private information, as is the patient’s intrins...

Location-specific norms of behavior are a widespread phenomenon. In the case of medical practice, numerous studies have found that geographic location exerts a strong influence on the choice of treatments and procedures. This paper shows how the presence of social influence on treatment decisions can help to explain this phenomenon. We construct a theoretical model in which physicians’ treatmen...

Our analysis of 19 OECD countries over the period 1972-2006 provides evidence of convergence in per capita health care expenditures for 17 countries, while the US and (to a lesser degree) Norway follow a different path. A simple decomposition of per capita health expenditures reveals that the divergence of the US comes from the divergence of the ‘health care expenditure over GDP’ component, whi...

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...

Publicly provided health care implies considerable intergenerational redistribution. The possibility of accumulating a fund or debt will a®ect the degree of redistribution as well as how e±cient the ̄nancing of health care is. In a voting model we study how governments inability to make binding long-term policy commitments will a®ect the accumulation of a fund or debt. Today's government will b...

Peer Effects, Unobserved Factors and Risk Behaviours: An Analysis of Alcohol Abuse and Truancy among Adolescents The objective of this paper is to examine the factors which affect alcohol abuse and truancy among adolescents. We propose a new theoretical specification in which alcohol abuse and truancy appear as derived demands, given that they condition peer group and family acceptance, and we ...

This paper extends Brock and Durlauf’s models on binary choice with social interactions. In the extended model, an individual will form expected behaviors of peers taking into account their characteristics. The expected behaviors of peers in a group are heterogeneous. The expectations of peers are determined as rational expectations. We consider models in both group and network settings. Endoge...