The first major insurance expansion of the Affordable Care Act – a provision requiring insurers to allow dependents to remain on parents’ health insurance until turning 26 – took effect in September 2010. We estimate this mandate's impacts on numerous outcomes related to health care...

Each year more infants are infected with HIV, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and mostly due to mother-to-child, or “vertical” transmission. Advances in ART made the prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) of HIV affordable in sub-Saharan Africa and other resource-constrained...

U.S. cancer screening guidelines recommend that cancer screening begin for breast cancer at age 40 and for colorectal cancer and prostate cancers at age 50. What are the marginal returns to physician and individual compliance with these cancer screening guidelines? We estimate the marginal...

Large literatures have shown important links between the quantity of completed education and health outcomes on one hand and the quality of schooling on a host of adult outcomes, such as wages, on the other hand. However, little research has been targeted to producing evidence of the link...

This paper begins the synthesis of two currently unrelated literatures: the human capital approach to health economics and the economics of cognitive and noncognitive skill formation. A lifecycle investment framework is the foundation for understanding the origins of human inequality and for...

For many health conditions, the best treatment is prevention. To this end, many countries and insurers around the world encourage individuals to participate in preventive care. Citizens in the Netherlands are offered several preventive health care interventions free of charge, including flu...

This working paper presents the findings of copy test research on consumer perceptions of heart-health claims in print advertisements for a fictitious cooking oil low in saturated fat, and a vegetable oil spread containing no trans fatty acids. FDA regulations currently ban potentially useful...

Using German census data we estimate the causal effect of education on smoking and overweight/obesity using the abolition of secondary school fees as instrumental variable. The West German federal states enacted this reform at different dates after World War II generating exogenous variation in...

Objectives. We developed a micro-costing methodology to estimate the real resource costs consumed by delivery of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Cooperative Agreement Standard Intervention (SI) for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevention, plus two enhanced modules, in a...

Objectives: Low-income women have high rates of smoking during pregnancy, but little is known about the costs, benefits, and cost-effectiveness of motivational interviewing (MI), focused on the medical and psychosocial needs of this population, as an intervention for smoking cessation and...