Does using prescription drugs off-label increase disability and medical expenditure? This paper uses a unique dataset to evaluate off-label vs. on-label drug use in the US non-institutionalized population. Patients using drugs off-label have on average $515 higher medical expenditure and...

In this paper, we address the issue of spurious correlation in the production of health in a systematic way. Spurious correlation entails the risk of linking health status to medical (and nonmedical) inputs when no links exist. This note first presents the bounds testing procedure as a method to...

There have been many studies of the volume-outcome relationship. In all of these, the unit of analysis is the hospital or physician. However, this level of analysis is mostly limited to the use of in-hospital mortality rates and is particularly sensitive to selective referral. Moreover, the...

Using data for six OECD countries, this paper studies the effect of macroeconomic conditions on the mortality index kt in the well-known Lee-Carter model. Significant correlations are found with real GDP growth rates in Australia, Canada, and the United States, and with unemployment rate changes...

The impact of global climate change on health is not well understood. Besides the direct channel of increasing temperatures, there is a potentially more harmful one: through an increase in extreme weather incidents. We offer the first evidence on the effect of natural disasters on pregnancy...

This paper tests whether there is evidence of compression of morbidity using data from the American Health and Retirement Study and analyzes the effects of this on the labor supply of older people. We find younger cohorts to suffer less from functional problems than older cohorts at given ages....

This paper investigates the role of pain in affecting self-reported work disability and employment of elderly workers in the US. We investigate pain and its relationship to work disability and work in a dynamic panel data model, using six biennial waves from the Health and Retirement Study. We...

This paper examines an accumulating modern literature on the health benefits of relationships like marriage. Although much remains to be understood about the physiological channels, we draw the judgment, after looking across many journals and disciplines, that there is persuasive longitudinal...

We employ a standard identification strategy from the peer effects literature to investigate the importance of network definitions in estimation of endogenous peer effects. We use detailed information on friends in the Adolescent Longitudinal Health Survey (Add Health) to construct two network...

This paper estimates the health returns to education, using data on identical twins. I adopt a twin-differences strategy in order to obtain estimates that are not biased by unobserved family background and genetic traits that may affect both education and health. I further investigate to what...