This article examines the extent to which differences in life-expectancy are associated with shifts in average hospital costs for different age groups. The size of the shift is important because it makes a large difference to the importance of demographic factors when projecting future health...

This paper investigates the extent to which conclusions from international comparison of health spending depend on different adjustment methods. The analysis shows, first, that health spending figures differ significantly because of different accounting standards. More specifically, spending on...

After 16 years of exemptions from the ban on indoor smoking in other places of work, Norway became the second country after Ireland to implement a smoke-free regime in pubs and restaurants. This paper evaluates the economic impact on the hospitality sector in a northern region with a cold...

At present, there exists no widely agreed upon set of study-design selection criteria for systematic reviews of health systems research, except for those proposed by the Cochrane Collaboration's Effective Practice and Organisation of Care (EPOC) review group (which comprises randomized...

The gateway, or stepping stone, hypothesis is important as it has had considerable influence on drug policy and legislation in many countries. The gateway hypothesis offers one possible explanation for young people's development of a serious drug problem. It simply states that the use of one...

The gateway hypothesis proposes that cannabis use increases the risk of starting to consume hard drugs. We test this controversial, but influential, hypothesis on a sample of cannabis users employing a unique set of drug prices. A flexible approach is developed to identify the causal gateway...

Do economists accept absurd and unsupported claims about reality, and if so, why? We define four types of claims commonly made in economics that require different types of evidence, and show examples of each from the rational addiction literature. Claims about real world causal mechanisms and...

Several empirical papers have indicated that the health inequalities in the Nordic welfare states seem to be at least as high as health inequalities in other European countries even if the Nordic states have a more egalitarian income structure. This is in contrast to standard economic theory...

This paper considers a model with a sponsor and several bureaus to analyse the role of sharing rules. Various incentives for budget overspending are identified; among them the overspending of budgets due to soft budget constraints. Four different sharing rules are also considered that differ with...