Health policies seek to achieve conflicting objectives. We argue that the objective of saving lives is best served by a careful balancing of fairness and efficiency considerations. Open, fair and equitable access to health care for all citizens will lower overall mortality rates by enabling the...

Objectives. We examined the effects of market income inequality (income inequality before taxes and transfers) and income redistribution via taxes and transfers on inequality in longevity. Methods. We used life tables to compute Gini coefficients of longevity inequality for all individuals and...

The estimation of slowly and rarely changing variables in panel data with unobserved unit effects suffers from inefficiency of the fixed effects estimator. Point estimates lack reliability when the within variance (the variation across time) remains small. The estimate's efficiency can be...

The introduction of the Euro has considerably affected the de facto monetary policy autonomy - defined as statistical independence from monetary policy in the key currency areas - in countries outside the European Currency Union. Using a standard open economy framework we argue that de facto...

The hypothesis that political violence deters tourism is mainly based on case study evidence and a few quantitative studies confined to a small sample of countries. This is the first comprehensive, general quantitative test of the impact of various forms of political violence on tourist...

In his article with the provocative title “Are Recessions Good for Your Health?” Ruhm (2000) has found robust and consistent evidence that the total mortality rate, age-specific mortality rates as well as most specific mortality causes are pro-cyclical. His finding that high unemployment...

National cultures of suicide have found renewed interest in the recent literature on variation in suicide rates. Fixed-effects estimation controls more elegantly and comprehensively for such cultures than other approaches used in the existing literature. This article's analysis employs a range...