Privacy regulations can affect the willingness to collect personal health data that may be disclosed to insurers. Perfect privacy cannot always be guaranteed. Consequently, people may refrain from collecting personal health data. This paper provides a theoretical and experimental analysis of the importance of privacy regulations for information acquisition and disclosure behavior. We contrast t...

Understanding the Economic Consequences of Shifting Trends in Population Health The public economic burden of shifting trends in population health remains uncertain. Sustained increases in obesity, diabetes, and other diseases could reduce life expectancy − with a concomitant decrease in the public-sector’s annuity burden − but these savings may be offset by worsening functional status, which i...

To our knowledge, the present study provides a first time assessment of the contributions of socioeconomic determinants of immunization coverage in India using the recent National Family Health Survey data. Measurement of socioeconomic inequalities in health and health care, and understanding the determinants of such inequalities in terms of their contributions, are critical for health interven...

Hospital acquired infections (HAI) are a largely avoidable and costly burden on public health systems. Accurate estimates of the costs of HAI are necessary to gauge the cost efficiency of alternative infection control measures, but are traditionally very difficult to compute. In particular, existing studies of the costs of HAI do not take into account the possible endogeneity bias between the r...

Abstract Height is the result of a complex process of growth that begins at birth and reaches the end in early adulthood. This paper studies the determinants of height from birth to maturity. A height production function is specified whose structure allows height to be the result of the accumulation of inputs (i.e., nutrition and diseases) over time. The empirical specification allows the causa...

The In-Hospital Mortality Rates of Slaves and Freemen: Evidence from Touro Infirmary, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1855–1860 Using a rich sample of admission records from New Orleans Touro Infirmary, we examine the in-hospital mortality risk of free and enslaved patients. Despite a higher mortality rate in the general population, slaves were significantly less likely to die in the hospital than the ...

This paper explores the potential role of adverse working conditions in the determination of workers’ sickness absences. Our data contain detailed information on the prevalence of job disamenities at the workplace from a representative sample of Finnish workers. The results from reduced-form models reveal that workers facing adverse working conditions tend to have a greater number of sickness a...

Work-related stress can lead to substantial health problems and thereby result in immense costs for establishments. Therefore, the question as to what extent establishments contribute to their employees’ stress levels is of great importance for firm performance. We investigate the relationship between personnel policies and work-related stress by considering a series of personnel policies that ...

We consider a model of Paired Kidney Exchange (PKE) with feasibility con-straints on the number of patient-donor pairs involved in exchanges. Patients’preferences are restricted so that patients prefer kidneys from compatible youngerdonors to kidneys from older donors. In this framework, patients with compati-ble donors may enroll on PKE programs to receive an organ with higher ...

Does Money Burn Fat? Evidence from a Randomized Experiment We test whether financial incentives have an effect on weight reduction in a randomized controlled trial involving 700 obese persons assigned to three experimental groups. While two treatment groups obtain €150 and €300, respectively, for achieving an individually assigned target weight within four months, a control group receives no su...