In the last decades, demographic change coupled with new and expensive medical innovations have put most health care systems in developed countries under financial pressure. Therefore, ensuring efficient service provision is essential for a sustainable health care system. This paper investigates...

We estimate the marginal cost of life using age- and gender-specific health care expenditures and mortality rates of the 26 Swiss cantons for the period 1997 to 2006. We show triple the marginal cost of saving a life for women as compared to men, reflecting a lower marginal elasticity of medical...

It has been established in the medical literature that self-medicating with imperfect information about either the use of a genuine or counterfeit drug or based on wrong self-diagnosis of ailment, which is predominant especially in developing countries, is a risky investment in health capital....

Along with the economic and technological developments of the past decades, obesity has become a growing public health problem. This study empirically investigates whether the large and widespread increases in body-mass index (BMI) that have been observed around the world are related to economic...

We examine the impact of new medical information on drug safety on preventive health behavior. We exploit the release of the findings of the Women's Health Initiative Study (WHIS) - the largest randomized controlled trial of women's health - which demonstrated in 2002 that long-term Hormone...

In the last decades, demographic change coupled with new and expensive medical innovations have put most health care systems in developed countries under financial pressure. Therefore, ensuring efficient service provision is essential for a sustainable health care system. This paper investigates...

We examine the impact of new medical information on drug safety on preventive health behavior. We exploit the release of the findings of the Women's Health Initiative Study (WHIS) – the largest randomized controlled trial of women's health – which demonstrated in 2002 that long-term Hormone...

This paper examines the economic determinants of participation in physical activity by developing and analyzing a consumer choice model of participation and by testing the predictions of this model using data drawn from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey (BRFSS). Both emphasize that...