Improving the productivity of the healthcare system, for example by taking advantage of scale economies or encouraging substitution of expensive specialist personnel with less expensive workers, is often seen as an attractive way to meet increasing demand within a constrained budget. Using data...

Discrete variables that have an inherent sense of ordering across outcomes are commonly found in large datasets available to many economists, and are often the focus of research. However, assumptions underlying the standard Ordered Probit (which is usually used to analyse such variables) are not...

This paper focuses on the self-reported responses given to survey questions of the form In general how would you rate your health? with typical response items being on a scale ranging from poor to excellent. Usually, the overwhelming majority of responses fall in either the middle category or...