The size of government depends positively on the labor share given price-inelastic demand for public services. OECD data support this hypothesis and also show a stronger dependence under left-wing ideology because larger government employs a larger workforce. A permanent one standard deviation...

In this paper, we consider a specification testing problem in nonlinear time series models with nonstationary regressors and propose using a nonparametric kernel-based test statistic. The nullasymptotics for the proposed nonparametric test statistic have been well developed in the existing...

The general aim of this paper is to review how matching methods try to solve the evaluation problem – with a particular focus on propensity score matching – and their usefulness for the particular case of health programme evaluation. The “classical” case of matching estimation with a...

An increasing amount of empirical evidence suggests that patients with higher socioeconomic status wait less within publicly-funded hospitals to receive non-emergency (elective) surgery. Using data from Australia, we investigate the extent to which such gradient can be explained by sample...

The age-specific body mass index (BMI) of adult Japanese women has steadily decreased over time, while that of Japanese men has increased. This study examines the long-term trend of age-specific BMI in Japan, by combining unique historical data sets and conducting nonparametric regression...

Body mass index (BMI), weight(kg)/ height(m)2, is a widely used measure for obesity in medical science. In economics, there appeared studies (e.g., Cawley (2004) and Burkhauser and Cawley (2008)) showing that BMI has a negative (or no) effect on wage. But BMI is a tightly specified function of...

The nature of the relationship between health and income is still not clearly defined. It is believed that personal income affects health but this may not be the end of the story. Income may also play its part through issues of relativity and deprivation. It may even be possible that these...

Cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs) that use patient-specific data on costs and health outcomes from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) are popular, yet such CEAs are often criticized because they neglect to incorporate evidence external to the trial. Although evidence directly defined on cost...

This study develops a discrete multiple state duration model that al- lows for duration dependence, unmeasured heterogeneity, partial observ- ability of the state and endogenous time-varying treatment. Our econo- metric strategy has numerous potential empirical applications. We apply our...

In this paper we analyze asymmetric information in the (private) disability insurance, which has not been analyzed before in the literature, but covers one of the most important risks faced by individuals in modern society, namely the loss of human capital. We show that there is asymmetric...