The main objective of this article is to evaluate to which extent the set of national and regional cost control policies implemented in recent years in Italy have affected hospital activity. Our contribution is mainly empirical as we focus our attention on the impact that policies like hospital...

This paper aims at evaluating the impact of 1998 Chinese health care reform on out-of-pocket expenditure and on saving. Existing evidence on the results achieved by this reform in terms of reduction of out-of-pocket medical expenditures is still mixed and contradictory, and very little is known...

A large body of literature, mainly based on hospital costs, shows that time to death (TTD) is by far a better predictor of health spending than age. In this paper, we investigate if this finding holds true also in presence of outpatient costs (drugs, diagnostic tests and specialist visits). Our...

We study the relationship between gerontocracy and aggregate economic performance in a simple model where growth is driven by human capital accumulation and productive government spending (investments in ICT). We show that gerontocratic élites display the tendency to underinvest in public...

In this paper we empirically study the relationship between education attainment and Body Mass Index (BMI), using as theoretical reference an energy balance model. Our data consist of individual level data from eight waves of the Italian survey on life-styles. We use Quantile Regression (QR)...

The aim of the paper is to shed some light on consumers' attitudes to adopting strategies to contain the cost of medication. Using micro-data from an ad hoc survey conducted in Italy and the UK, several hypotheses are tested regarding patients' decision-making behavior and how it is influenced...

Charges for health services help contain healthcare costs. Despite showing that medicine consumption decreases when charges are increased research has not yet identified how doctors 'manage' the charge system to help patients who cannot afford treatment. This paper describes how the charge...

The aim of this research is to investigate the relationship between obesity and wages, using data for nine countries from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) over the period 1998-2001. We improve upon the existing literature by adopting a Quantile Regression approach to characterize...

Household surveys frequently record only expenditure information. The lack of information about quantities purchased precludes the possibility of deriving household specific unit values. The aggregate price indexes derived from sources exogenous to the household survey are often not sufficient...

The aim of the paper is to disentangle the roles that patients, physicians and technology can have on patient health outcomes using a large and detailed dataset of Italian patients collected by the Italian College of General Practitioners (SIMG) over the period 2001–2006. As our data show the...