Efficiency measurement has been one of the most extensively explored areas of health services research over the past two decades. Despite this attention, few studies have examined whether a provider’s efficiency varies on a monthly, quarterly or other, sub-annual basis. This paper presents an...

Conceptual modeling and empirical analysis of individuals’ sequential self-selection of adherence to voluntary treatment or education programs is an ongoing and unsettled area of inquiry. Both the representation of the decision process and the implementation of econometric methods for...

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is among the most popular empirical tools for measuring cost and productive efficiency within an industry. Because DEA is a linear programming technique, establishing formal statistical properties for outcomes is difficult. We model the incidence of inefficiency...

Many international institutions, including the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), have recommended that countries adopt universal health care coverage, believing that adequate health care is a basic human right. Thailand became the first developing country to introduce universal...

This paper studies how the change from retrospective cost-based reimbursement to a prospective payment system shifted hospital investment strategies from quality-enhancing technologies to cost-saving technologies. A consequence of this change was the opportunity for for-profit hospitals to...

When a binary dependant variable is misclassified probit and logit estimates are biased and inconsistent. In this paper we suggest a conceptual basis for endogenous misclassification of the dependant variable due to systematic respondent bias and the use of Likert scales commonly used in...

In four Southern African countries where the HIV prevalence rate is among the highest in the world, 46% of female and 68% of male adolescents infected with HIV report having never engaged in sex. This finding indicates either the dominance of non-sexual modes of HIV transmission or systematic...

We examine how personality relates to self-reported health satisfaction. With a nation-wide dataset from the United Kingdom, we provide evidence that personality influences how individuals report their satisfaction with their overall health. Using the classification of personality traits...

Researchers often use the discrepancy between the self-reported and biochemically assessed active smoking status to argue that self-reported smoking status is not reliable, ignoring the limitations of biochemically assessed measures and treating it as the gold standard in their comparisons....