This paper examines the causality between central government spending in regions and local elections, in an environment of increasing electoral competition and a undefined decentralisation. This study examines Mexican elections during the period 1990-1995 where the main party started loosing...

Uniform health care delivered by a mainstream public insurer – such as the National Health Service (NHS), seldom satisfies heterogeneous demands for care, and some unsatisfied share of the population either use private health care, or purchase private insurance (PHI). One potential mechanism...

Understanding the malleability of gender norms is crucial to address gender inequalities. We study the effect of parenting daughters on a gender role attitude relating to the traditional male breadwinner model: whether the husband should earn and the wife stay at home. We control for other...

We study the health effects of the spread of democratic institutions and the extension of voting rights in 15 European countries since the middle of the nineteenth century. We employ both cross country and cohort variation in heights and employ a new instrument for democracy and the extension of...

Approaches to measuring health inequalities are often problematic in that they use methods that are inappropriate for categorical data. The approach here focuses on "pure" or univariate health inequality (rather than income-related or bivariate health inequality) and is based on a concept of...

We examine evidence from two unique discrete choice experiments (DCE) on long term care insurance and several of its relevant attributes, and more specifically, choices made by 15,298 individuals in the United States with and without insurance. We study the valuation of the following insurance...

Traditional economic interpretations have not been successful in explaining differences in saving rates across countries. One hypothesis is that savings respond to cultural specific social norms. A seminal paper in economics (1) however did not find any effect of culture on savings. We revisit...

We study the effect of ageing, defined as an extra year of life, on health care utilisation. We disentangle the direct effect of ageing, from other alternative explanations such as the presence of comorbidities and endogenous time to death (TTD) that are argued to absorb the effect of ageing (...

The worldwide obesity epidemic has impacted women more heavily than men. These gender-based differences are particularly pronounced in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region where gender obesity gaps on average exceed 10 percentage points. This paper examines one of the explanations,...