We provide an overview of the growing literature that uses micro-level data from multiplecountries to investigate health outcomes, and their link to socioeconomic factors, at olderages. Since the data are at a comparatively young stage, much of the analysis is at an earlystage and limited to a...

Micro-based and macro-based approaches have been used to assess the effects of health on economic growth. Micro-based approaches aggregate the return on individual health from Mincerian wage regressions to derive the macroeconomic effects of population health. Macro-based approaches estimate a...

Risky health behaviors such as smoking, drinking alcohol, drug use, unprotected sex, and poor diets and sedentary lifestyles (leading to obesity) are a major source of preventable deaths. This chapter overviews the theoretical frameworks for, and empirical evidence on, the economics of risky...

Social stress can cause physical and mental harm. It is therefore not surprising that public health policy makers have sought to identify and implement policies aimed at tackling this social ill. A frequently prescribed remedy is to reduce social stress by reducing income inequality, which is...

We investigate how, in temporary economic hardship, agents change their consumption of health services, and how this depends on whether the service is universally free-of-charge visits to GP's or privately co-financed dental care. We find that own expenditures for dental care decrease. The...

Doing "more" in healthcare can be a major threat to the delivery of high-quality health care. This study used coarsened exact matching to test the hypothesis of supplier-induced demand (SID) by comparing health care utilization and expenditures between patients affiliated with healthcare...

This paper identifies health determinants in urban China applying the Grossman model. Using a wave of China Health and Nutrition Survey in 2000, we find that education has an important positive effect on health, and cost of health care services has a significantly negative impact. However,...

This short essay reviews Gary Becker's contributions and influence in health economics. It was originally prepared for the collection of short papers in honor of Gary Becker that is scheduled to appear in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Demographic Economics

In this paper I examine changes in self-employment that have occurred since the early 1980s in the United States. It is a companion paper to a recent equivalent paper relating to the UK. Data on random samples of twenty million US workers are examined taken from the Basic Monthly files of the...

Compiling data from dozens of archival sources, I compile the most extensive series to date of the long-run imprisonment rate for five English-speaking nations: Australia, Canada, England and Wales, New Zealand and the United States. These series are constructed as a share of adults rather than...