Explaining the rationale of preventive care underuse is a difficult task considering its great benefits for health. Underuse is even more difficult to explain in countries like Italy where preventive care can be obtained for free. In this article we investigate the determinants of prevention...

In recent years, economic research on the socio-economic determinants of health has significantly;grown given the importance of health for individual wellbeing. Most of the work up to now;has focused on the effects of individual socio-economic conditions, whereas, more recently, the view that...

Using a rich Italian cross-sectional dataset, we estimate the effect of a neighborhood problems aggregate (including pollution, crime, and noise) on self-assessed health, presence of chronic conditions and limitations in daily activities. We address the self-selection of the residents in their...

Using a rich Italian survey, we investigate the effect of height on individual happiness. From our analysis it emerges that a large part of the effect of height on well-being is driven by a positive correlation between height and economic and health conditions. However, for young males the...

The importance of social comparison in shaping individual utility has been widely documented by subjective well-being literature. So far, income has been the main dimension considered in social comparison. This paper aims to investigate whether subjective well-being is influenced by...

SUMMARY When fitting an econometric model, it is well known that we pick up part of the idiosyncratic characteristics of the data along with the systematic relationship between dependent and explanatory variables. This phenomenon is known as overfitting and generally occurs when a model is...

This paper uses a common household survey instrument and a common set of imputation assumptions to estimate the pro-poorness of government health expenditure across 69 countries at all levels of income. On average, government health expenditure emerges as significantly pro-rich, but there is...

The explanatory factors of individual healthcare consumption are studied by means of healthcare expenditures from the 2000–2005 Swiss Household Income and Expenditure Survey (SHIES). In order to tackle the issues of large number of null expenditures and skewed distribution of positive...

This paper presents an application of the Duclos et al. [Duclos, J.-Y., Jalbert, V., Araar A., 2003. Classical horizontal inequity and reranking: an integrated approach. Research on Economic Inequality 10, 65-100] decomposition to an analysis of the 1998 Swiss health system financing. We see...

Despite being strongly recommended for health, preventive care is significantly underused even in countries like Italy where it can be obtained for free. We analyze the determinants of pap test and mammography utilization with an empirical model based on human capital theory. One original...