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...

This paper reports briefly on some of the results from a survey of academics who have written about the theory of rational addiction. The topic is important in itself because if the literature is viewed by its participants as an intellectual game, then policy makers should be aware of this so as...

Dette notatet presenterer en enkel modell som viser hvordan kortere arbeidsdag i sektorer med overlappende arbeidstid medfører at en økende andel av arbeidstiden vil gå med til rapportering og en mindre andel vil være effektiv arbeidstid. Denne mekanismen gjør en liten endring i...

According to the OECD Norway spends 47% more on health care per capita compared to Finland and about 30% more than the other Nordic countries. At the same time indicators of health status show that Norway is not better on important indicators of health. This raises the question of why there is...

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...