This paper provides a theoretical and empirical investigation of the positive complementarities between disease-specific policies introduced by competing risks of mortality. The incentive to invest in prevention against one cause of death depends positively on the level of survival from other...

Applying the competing--risks model to multi--cause mortality, this paper provides a theoretical and empirical investigation of the positive complementarities that occur between disease--specific policy interventions. We argue that since an individual cannot die twice, competing risks imply that...

Infectious disease is currently the main cause of mortality in the world and has been even more important historically. This paper reviews recent research in economic epidemiology. Specifically, it discusses the occurrence of infectious diseases and the effects of public health interventions...

A central problem in applied empirical work is to separate out the patterns in the data that are due to poor production of the data, such as e.g. non-response and measurement errors, from the patterns attributable to the economic phenomena studied. This paper interprets this inference problem as...

One goal of government health insurance programs is to improve health, yet little is known empirically about how important such government interventions can be in explaining health transitions. We analyze the child mortality effects of a major health insurance expansion in Costa Rica. In...

HIV-prevention strategies have yielded only limited success so far in slowing down the AIDS epidemic. This paper examines novel intervention strategies that use incentives to discourage risky sexual behaviors. Widely-adopted conditional cash transfer programs that offer payments conditioning on...

A key issue surrounding employer benefit mandates is the incidence on workers through wages and employment. In this paper, we address this question using a pay-or-play policy implemented in San Francisco in 2008 that requires employers to either provide health benefits or contribute to a public...