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...

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...

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...

This paper estimates, using a large panel data set from rural Bangladesh, the effects of health shocks on household consumption and how access to microcredit affects households’ response to such shocks. Our results suggest that even though in general consumption remains stable in many cases when households are exposed to health shocks, households that have access to microcredit appear to cope (...

Stature and Life-Time Labor Market Outcomes: Accounting for Unobserved Differences We use twin data matched to register-based individual information on earnings and employment to examine the effect of height on life-time labor market outcomes. The use of twin data allows us to remove otherwise unobserved ability and other differences. The twin pair difference estimates from instrumental variabl...

Smoking Persistence Across Countries: An Analysis Using Semi-Parametric Dynamic Panel Data Models with Selectivity We study smoking persistence in ten countries using data from the European Community Household Panel. Such persistence may be due to true state dependence but may also reflect individual unobserved heterogeneity. We distinguish between the two by using semiparametric dynamic panel ...

This paper complements existing cross-section and panel data analyses of the interaction of income and health outcomes by applying a cointegrating VAR model of income and health to time-series data for several Scandinavian countries. The results are consistent with previous crosssection and panel results, but also highlight the complexity and heterogeneity of the dynamic relationships that gene...