I consider the problem of evaluating the effect of a health care reform on the demand for doctor visits when the effect is potentially different in different parts of the outcome distribution. Quantile regression is a useful technique for studying such heterogeneous treatment effects. Recent progree has been made to extend such methods to applications with a count dependent variable. An analysi...

A theoretical model of the ethical preferences of individuals is tested by conducting a choice experiment on safety-enhancing road investments. The relative value of a saved life is found to decrease with age, such that the present value of a saved year of life is almost independent of age at a pure rate of time preference of a few percent, and a saved car driver is valued 17-31% lower than a p...

In this paper, we propose a decision framework where people are individually asked either to consent actively to or reject some pro-social behavior. We hypothesize that confronting individuals with the choice of engaging in a specific pro-social behavior contributes to the formation of issue-specific altruistic preferences while simultaneously involving a commitment. The hypothesis is tested in...

We identify the rate of off-label use of prescription drugs in the United States during 1993-2008. We apply Detection Controlled Estimation to a comprehensive crosssection of prescriptions and find that rates of off-label use rise from 30.2% to 39.1% during this period. This coincides with a surge in settlements of Department of Justice lawsuits for off-label marketing. Additionally, physicians...

The economics of happiness is applied to further the understanding of important consumption decisions in which limited willpower is often argued to lead to suboptimal choices. Based on individuals’ judgments of the quality of their lives, it is, in principle, possible to derive whether some observed behavior is suboptimal and is therefore reducing a person’s welfare. We discuss the key characte...

Quality-of-care issues in the US dialysis industry have led to proposals to proscribe physician ownership of these facilities. The logic behind this approach relates to a profits/quality tradeoff created by the existing reimbursement structure. Given that tradeoff, separating ownership from quality-of-care decision making ostensibly could improve performance. Our empirical results, however, do ...

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...