a theory of socio economic disparities in health over the life cycle motivated by the observation that medical care explains only a relatively small part of the ses health gradient we present a life cycle model that incorporates several additional behaviours that potentially explain jointly a large part of observed disparities as a result the model provides not only a conceptual framework for the ses health gradient but more generally an improved framework for the production of health we derive novel predictions from the theory by performing comparative dynamic analyses more generally our comparative dynamic method can be applied to models of similar form e g human capital health deficits firm investment to name a few

role of carbon swap trading and energy prices in price correlations and volatilities between carbon markets the present paper theoretically and empirically examines the role of carbon swap trading and energy prices in volatilities and price correlations between the eu and kyoto protocol emissions trading schemes a supply and demand based correlation model between eua and scer price returns is proposed in detail using inverse box cox type marginal abatement cost mac curves and simple emission reduction volume processes the model includes financial players eua scer swap transaction in boom periods of carbon prices using the logit model for eua and eua scer swap volume correlations and stronger energy price impacts on eua prices than scer prices using a mean reverting lognormal process for energy prices the empirical studies using eua and scer prices estimate the model parameters resulting in a positive eua volume impact on eua scer swap transactions and a positive energy price impact on eua prices it is shown that high eua scer price correlations during high eua price periods stemmed from eua scer swap transactions whereas high eua scer price correlations during the period of financial turmoil with low eua prices came from the drop in energy prices we also show that the leverage effects often observed in security markets exist in both the eua and scer markets according to the price volatility relation

spatial effects of air pollution on public health in china increasingly serious air pollution poses a great threat to public health and daily life based on the grossman china health production function this paper examines the effects of the spatial agglomeration of chinese public health and the spatial effects of air pollution and other factors on public health considering three aspects this study employed chinese macro data on public health and air pollution from 2004 to 2013 to conduct an empirical analysis using a spatial econometrics technique the main conclusions are as follows due to extensive and persistent air pollution there was a significant spatial agglomeration impact on public health regional public health presented a convergence effect and effects of air pollution s negative externalities on public health were significant compared with the estimation results obtained when spatial dependence was not considered the negative effect of the concentration of pm2 5 on public health was higher implying that the traditional approaches tend to create biases when spatial correlation is ignored from a regional perspective the regional differences in the effects of air pollution on public health were significant adopting differentiated environmental policies for different regions is the future direction towards which china s environmental governance will develop

valuing morbidity from wildfire smoke exposure a comparison of revealed and stated preference techniques estimating the economic benefits of reduced health damages due to improvements in environmental quality continues to challenge economists we review welfare measures associated with reduced wildfire smoke exposure and a unique dataset from california s station fire of 2009 allows for a comparison of cost of illness coi estimates with willingness to pay wtp measures the wtp for one less symptom day is estimated to be 87 and 95 using the defensive behavior and contingent valuation methods respectively these wtp estimates are not statistically different but do differ from a 3 traditional daily coi estimate and 17 comprehensive daily coi estimate jel q51 q53

pollution private investment in healthcare and environmental policy in this paper we demonstrate that in a two period overlapping generations model the relationship between environmental taxation and economic activity output level and growth has an inverted u shape when we take into account the detrimental impact of pollution on health and the individual decision of each working age agent to improve her health we also demonstrate that the link between environmental tax and lifetime welfare also has an inverted u shape and that a tighter environmental policy might enhance economic activity while reducing steady state lifetime welfare finally we investigate the social optimum and the determinants of the optimal environmental tax

stochastic convenience yield and the pricing of oil contingent claims this paper develops and empirically tests a two factor model for pricing financial and real assets contingent on the price of oil the factors are the spot price of oil and the instantaneous convenience yield the parameters of the model are estimated using weekly oil futures contract prices from january 1984 to november 1988 and the model s performance is assessed out of sample by valuing futures contracts over the period november 1988 to may 1989 finally the model is applied to determine the present values of one barrel of oil deliverable in one to ten years time

beauty and the labor market the authors examine the impact of looks on earnings using interviewers ratings of respondents physical appearance plain people earn less than average looking people who earn less than the good looking the plainness penalty is 5 to 10 percent slightly larger than the beauty premium effects for men are at least as great as for women unattractive women have lower labor force participation rates and marry men with less human capital better looking people sort into occupations where beauty may be more productive but the impact of individuals looks is mostly independent of occupation suggesting the existence of pure employer discrimination copyright 1994 by american economic association

econometric studies in health economics a survey of the british literature this paper provides a survey of british applied econometric work in the field of health economics as well as reviewing the literature it suggests some avenues for future research it covers six main areas the supply of health care the demand for health care non medical influences on health market and non price rationing evaluation of health care systems and planning budgeting and monitoring mechanisms

the family as the health producer when spouses are nash bargainers the grossman model is extended to a situation in which the family is regarded as the producer of individual health and spouses are nash bargainers the model has implications for the interaction between family structure income and the stocks of health capital and the bargaining strength of different family members the main insight is that the possibility of divorce affects the distribution of health capital between family members we analyse inter alia the impact on the distribution of health particularly regarding child health of changes in family policies related to the dissolution of the family

when social and economic goals meet the double dividend of improving farmers health capital in uganda abstractfocusing on the relationship between farmers health and agricultural productivity we explore the potential effects of improving the current health care fee policy in uganda using a microsimulated general equilibrium model we show that alternative health fee reduction strategies might increase the chances of achieving simultaneous growth poverty reduction and improved access to health for households while maximising the public spending effectiveness however these results seem very sensitive to the potential disruptive effects on public facilities that such a policy might generate so they must be contextualised within a broader perspective on the health system s efficiency

uncertainty and health care spending by the poor the health capital model revisited this short theoretical paper examines health care utilization by the poor in the context of grossman s 1972 health capital model earlier work has shown that uncertainty can reduce the attractiveness to the poor of health capital investments this paper demonstrates that uncertainty can also have precisely the opposite effect that is while there may be cases in which it is excessively risky for the poor to invest in their health there may also be cases in which the poor can ill afford the risks that arise from not making timely investments in their health

measuring benefits from air pollution control where do we stand measuring the benefits from reduced morbidity this paper presents a simple model of preventive health care similar to that of grossman 1972 and uses the model to define what a person would pay for a change in air quality the model assumes that one can build up resistance to acute illnes by increasing his stock of health capital however health capital decays at a rate which depends on air pollution for acute illness willingness to pay as derived from the model is greater than the benefit estimate computed using the damage function approach to illustrate the size of this discrepancy estimates of willingness to pay are computed using data from the michigan panel study of income dynamics the case for government providing information about risks rests secure in the theory of public goods informational scale economies and problems of dissemination conceivably call for a principal agent relationship in which certain types of decisions are delegated to the agency however the setting of standards and prohibitions is too simplistic it seldom recognizes that personal action tends to interact with and partially offset them 8 references

valuing environmental health effects an economic perspective this paper provides an overview of some of the issues involved in comparing benefit cost analysis and cost effectiveness analysis based on quality adjusted life years as alternative approaches to assessing environmental policies that affect human health it concludes that i although qalys have the advantage of reflecting policy impacts on both health status and longevity in a single scalar measure they are not consistent with utility theory unless individuals preferences satisfy some restrictive conditions ii they do not capture other important aspects of the valuation of changes in mortality and morbidity iii cost effectiveness analysis based on qalys as a measure of effectiveness omits non health related effects of environmental policy and iv it leaves unanswered the important question of what level of environmental regulation is appropriate

a model of the demand for longevity and the value of life extension we specify a demand function for longevity or quantity of life along with corresponding demand functions for indicators of quality of life and a value of health and life extension function we show that the demand for health must be derived in conjunction with that for longevity and the related consumption plan and that all choices depend on initial individual endowments and terminal conditions our comparative dynamics predictions indicate that optimal health and longevity are increasing functions of endowed wealth rather than necessarily current income that improvements in opportunities to produce health can accentuate the differences between endowed health and attained longevity levels and that the value individuals ascribe to their health may be increasing over a good portion of their life cycle we use this model to analyze observed empirical variations in levels and trends of life expectancy and in exposure to health risks across different population groups

an econometric model of the two part decision process in the demand for health the decision to contact a physician and the decision about how often to contact a physician are determined by different decisionmakers we introduce a negative binomial distributed hurdle model that specifies the two stages of the decisionmaking process as different stochastic processes while at the same time taking care of the discrete nature of the data empirical results are based on a cross section of the west german socioeconomic panel specification tests reveal that the two stages of the process need to be treated as two distinct processes this in turn implies that ignoring this distinction leads to serious misinterpretation

the demand for health with uncertainty and insurance this paper develops michael grossman s demand for health model by letting the depreciation rate depend upon the level of health by letting the incidence and size of illness be uncertain and by investigating how the individual s demand for health would be affected by the introduction of insurance beside the more theoretical results there are also some results with important policy implications when formulating the hypothetical scenario in willingness to pay wtp studies it is important whether the individual believes that the level of health is uncertain or not the existence of insurance could also affect the stated wtp amount taking this into account could therefore explain some of the differences in the wtp for seemingly identical health care programs in different countries or different areas in the same country

demand for medical care consumption and cointegration abstract this paper considers a generalized version of grossman s health capital model and derives a cointegration restriction the restriction is tested using aggregate us data and the results are consistent with the prediction of the model

parental behavior and the value of children s health a health production approach data on individual children and on sibling pairs are used to examine how family resource allocations affect children s health and to estimate willingness to pay for reduced acute illness in children results highlight the importance of accounting for the endogeneity of child health and suggest that children with greater stocks of health capital whose parents invest in preventive and remedial medical care experience fewer days of illness estimated willingness to pay to avoid one day of illness induced school loss is about 100 to 150 a range broadly consistent with limited prior evidence but sub stantially more than unit values applied in recent policy analyses all else equal willingness to pay is higher among single parents and for uninsured children and the estimated income elasticity is only 0 14 implied aggregate benefits of reductions in children s sick time associated with air pollution control may be substantial

modelling energy spot prices empirical evidence from nymex this paper investigates the behaviour of spot prices in eight energy markets that trade futures contracts on nymex we consider two types of models a mean reverting model and a spike model with mean reversion that incorporates two different speeds of mean reversion one for the fast mean reverting behaviour of prices after a jump occurs and another for the slower mean reversion rate of the diffusive part of the model we also extend these models to incorporate time varying volatility in their specification modelled as a garch and an egarch process we compare the relative goodness of fit of the different modelling variations both in sample using monte carlo simulations as well as out of sample in a value at risk var setting our results indicate the presence of a leverage effect for wti heating oil and heating oil wti crack spread whereas for the remaining energy markets we find the presence of an inverse leverage effect also the addition of the egarch specification for the volatility process improves both the in sample fit as well as the out of sample var performance for most energy markets that we examine

determinants of health care expenditure in africa a cross sectional study the paper presents some quantitative evidence on the relationship between certain socioeconomic and demographic factors and per capita health care expenditure in africa first gnp per capita percentage of births attended by health staff and foreign aid received per capita together explained 78 3 of the variance in health care expenditure second per capita gnp is the most significant factor explaining differences in health care expenditure contrary to what has been found in comparisons of health care expenditure in the organization for economic cooperation and development oecd countries we found that the income elasticity is close to unity furthermore aid was consistently significant and positive in the three models estimated third variables such as crude birth rate and the population under 15 years of age as percentage of total population were not significant

the price of power the valuation of power and weather derivatives abstract pricing contingent claims on power presents numerous challenges due to 1 the unique behavior of power prices and 2 time dependent variations in prices we propose and implement a model in which the spot price of power is a function of two state variables demand load and fuel price in this model any power derivative price must satisfy a pde with boundary conditions that reflect capacity limits and the non linear relation between load and the spot price of power moreover since power is non storable and demand is not a traded asset the power derivative price embeds a market price of risk using inverse problem techniques and power forward prices from the pjm market we solve for this market price of risk function during 1999 2001 the upward bias in the forward price was as large as 50 mwh for some days in july by 2005 the largest estimated upward bias had fallen to 19 mwh these large biases are plausibly due to the extreme right skewness of power prices this induces left skewness in the payoff to short forward positions and a large risk premium is required to induce traders to sell power forwards this risk premium suggests that the power market is not fully integrated with the broader financial markets

an economic analysis of air pollution and health the case of st louis a health oriented choice model is developed in which individuals are viewed as producers of health and good health is desired for both consumption and investment purposes individuals are able to adjust their consumption of medical care in order to defend against reductions in air quality a compensating variation type marginal willingness to pay expression is derived for improved air quality and the model is tested using cross sectional data on employed adult residents of st louis missouri estimates of marginal willingness to pay for the average employed person are derived for a 30 reduction in ozone these values range from 18 45 to 24 48 per year

preventive care underused even when free is there something else at work explaining the rationale of preventive care underuse is a difficult task considering its great benefits for health underuse is even more difficult to explain in countries like italy where preventive care can be obtained for free in this article we investigate the determinants of prevention underuse with an empirical model based on human capital theory which also includes three factors to which little attention has been paid so far role played by the general practitioner gp nonmonetary barriers to access and health beliefs we apply a recursive probit model explaining both recourse to prevention and to the gp which allows us to adequately measure the effect of the latter on the former and to quantitatively compare the determinants of curative and preventive care we find that the gp plays a minor role in prevention use but that nonmonetary barriers to access and health beliefs are strong determinants of preventive care demand finally we also find support for both grossman s capital depreciation the

further results on the constant elasticity of variance call option pricing model the black scholes 4 call option model is a member of the class of constant elasticity of variance call option models proposed by cox 6 while the black scholes model assumes that the volatility or instantaneous variance of return is constant through time the other members of the class allow the volatility to change with the stock price this property is of interest because empirical evidence suggests that returns to common stock are heteroscedastic and also that volatilities implied from the black scholes model and market prices of call options are not constant

a supply and demand based volatility model for energy prices abstract this paper proposes a new volatility model for energy prices using the supply demand relationship which we call a supply and demand based volatility model we show that the supply curve shape in the model determines the characteristics of the volatility in energy prices it is found that the inverse box cox transformation supply curve reflecting energy markets causes the inverse leverage effect i e positive correlation between energy prices and volatility the model is also used to show that an existing g arch m model has the foundations on the supply demand relationship additionally we conduct the empirical studies analyzing the volatility in the u s natural gas prices

distribution of income and toxic emissions in maine united states inequality in two dimensions abstract ecological distribution refers to inequalities in the use of environmental sinks and sources this article explores one such dimension of ecological distribution that of toxic air emissions using data from the risk screening environmental indicators model and the united states census bureau i analyze the distribution of both environmental risk and income at the block group level in the state of maine the state of maine was chosen for its historical dependence upon natural resources as well as its economic and spatial heterogeneity results clearly indicate that the toxic air emissions are distributed much more unequally than is income and that those inequalities are reinforcing while not in itself an indication of environmental injustice such analyses may help us to rethink the assumption that there is a tradeoff between income and pollution

switching outputs in a bioenergy cogeneration project a real options approach abstract environmental concerns have stimulated the search for economically feasible renewable energy projects one such alternative is the use of biomass for energy generation which has increasingly been the focus of interest traditional valuation methods on the other hand fail to capture the value of the embedded options that exist in many of these projects which may lead to non optimal investment decisions in this article we analyze the feasibility of installing a cogeneration unit in an industrial plant in brazil in order to extract value from biomass residue currently discarded which can be used for thermal and electric energy generation the cogeneration unit also allows the firm the flexibility to optimally choose between an increase in production or the generation of surplus energy for sale in the short term market once additional investment in interconnection to the grid is made we model the uncertainty over future energy prices as a mean reverting process with jumps and seasonality and the embedded flexibility as a bundle of european options under the real options approach the results indicate that the investment in the cogeneration plant is warranted and that the option to switch outputs adds significant value to the project which suggests that biomass residue may be a sustainable energy alternative in this case

comparative dynamic analysis of the full grossman model the paper applies the method of comparative dynamic analysis to the full grossman model for a particular class of solutions it derives the equations implicitly defining the complete trajectories of the endogenous variables relying on the concept of frisch decision functions the impact of any parametric change on an endogenous variable can be decomposed into a direct and an indirect effect the focus of the paper is on marginal changes in the rate of health capital depreciation it also analyses the impact of either initial financial wealth or the initial stock of health capital while the direction of most effects remains ambiguous in the full model the assumption of a zero consumption benefit of health is sufficient to obtain a definite for any direct or indirect effect

social security longevity and moral hazard abstract recently several authors have argued that social security can have positive effects on savings and welfare when individuals possess hidden information about their longevity that is when there is adverse selection in annuity markets this paper considers the related problem of the effects of social security when individuals can take hidden actions to affect their longevity that is when there is moral hazard in annuity markets in contrast to the adverse selection models we show that social security never raises welfare in a pure moral hazard economy as well social security may either increase or reduce longevity depending on the characteristics of the health related goods consumed it is suggested that a complete analysis of social security needs to consider both adverse selection and moral hazard

demand for medical care by the elderly a finite mixture approach summary in this article we develop a finite mixture negative binomial count model that accommodates unobserved heterogeneity in an intuitive and analytically tractable manner this model the standard negative binomial model and its hurdle extension are estimated for six measures of medical care demand by the elderly using a sample from the 1987 national medical expenditure survey the finite mixture model is preferred overall by statistical model selection criteria two points of support adequately describe the distribution of the unobserved heterogeneity suggesting two latent populations the healthy and the ill whose fitted distributions diaer substantially from each other 1997 by john wiley sons ltd

ageing cognitive abilities and retirement we investigate the relationship between ageing cognitive abilities and retirement using the survey on health ageing and retirement in europe share a household panel that offers the possibility of comparing several european countries using nationally representative samples of the population aged 50 the human capital framework suggests that retirement may cause an increase in cognitive decline since after retirement individuals lose the market incentive to invest in cognitive repair activities our empirical results based on an instrumental variable strategy to deal with the potential endogeneity of retirement confirm this key prediction they also indicate that education plays a fundamental role in explaining heterogeneity in the level of cognitive abilities

estimating the commodity market price of risk for energy prices the purpose of this paper is to estimate the market price of risk mpr for energy commodities the ratio of expected return to standard deviation the mpr sign determines whether energy forward prices are upward or downward biased predictors of expected spot prices we estimate mprs using spot and futures prices while accounting for the samuelson effect we find long term mprs generally positive and short term negative consistent with positive energy betas and hedging respectively in spot electricity markets mprs in day ahead prices agree with short dated futures our results relate risk premia to informed hedging decisions and futures prices to forecast expected prices

non monotonic health behaviours implications for individual health related behaviour in a demand for health framework a number of behaviours influence health in a non monotonic way physical activity and alcohol consumption for instance may be beneficial to one s health in moderate but detrimental in large quantities we develop a demand for health framework that incorporates the feature of a physiologically optimal level an individual may still choose a physiologically non optimal level because of the trade off in his or her preferences for health versus other utility affecting commodities however any deviation above or below the physiologically optimal level will be punished with respect to health distinguishing between two individual types we study a the qualitative properties of optimal time paths of health capital and health related behaviour b the perturbations of the optimal time paths that result from changes in exogenous parameters and c steady state properties predictions of the model and the implications for empirical analysis are discussed at length some comments on potential future extensions conclude the paper

orchestrating impartiality the impact of blind auditions on female musicians a change in the audition procedures of symphony orchestras adoption of blind auditions with a screen to conceal the candidate s identity from the jury provides a test for sex biased hiring using data from actual auditions in an individual fixed effects framework we find that the screen increases the probability a woman will be advanced and hired although some of our estimates have large standard errors and there is one persistent effect in the opposite direction the weight of the evidence suggests that the blind audition procedure fostered impartiality in hiring and increased the proportion women in symphony orchestras

health as an unobservable a mimic model of demand for health care abstract this paper develops a model to analyze the demand for health care it differs from current practice in that 1 it deals explicitly with the complex relation between income health health insurance and the demand for health care and 2 health is treated as an unobservable variable we present the maximum likelihood estimates of an eleven equation simultaneous multiple indicator multiple causes mimic model containing two simultaneously determined unobservables and in total nine indicators data used stem from a health care survey among 8000 households in the netherlands the results show among other things that health and permanent income have mutual positive impacts both age and education have important direct and indirect via permanent income effects on health the estimated impact of the availability of health care on individual demand confirms similar results based on aggregated data

supply and demand for discrimination strategic revelation of own characteristics in a trust game in strategic settings a player may be able to influence the behavior of an opponent by revealing information about their own characteristics they may for example aim to exploit stereotypes held by others we provide an experimental test of this a substantial fraction of players in a trust game exhibit a positive willingness to pay to reveal a photograph of themselves to their randomly assigned partner this suggests that they perceive that they can use their own characteristics to influence the behavior of others the demand for such self revelation depends negatively on price

an econometric analysis of health care expenditure a cross section study of the oecd countries this paper is an empirical examination of the determinants of aggregate health care expenditure the paper presents a systematic analysis of relationships across 19 oecd countries showing the effects of aggregate income institutional and socio demographic factors on health care expenditure the results indicate that institutional factors of the health systems in addition to per capita gross domestic product gdp contribute significantly to the explanation of the health care expenditure variation between countries for example the way physicians in outpatient care are paid and the mixture of public private funding and inpatient outpatient care

the dynamic relationship between environmental pollution economic development and public health evidence from china abstract during the last two decades of rapid economic growth china s environmental pollution has become increasingly serious and the corresponding health damage has become a significant problem that has attracted domestic and foreign attention as china pursues sustainable economic growth the issues of environmental degradation and public health should be well addressed using sulfur dioxide emissions wastewater emissions and soot and dust emissions as indicators of environmental quality this study investigates the comprehensive dynamic relationship between environmental quality economic development and public health in china for the first time to control for potential endogeneity this paper utilizes a carefully designed simultaneous equation model sem that is composed of three equations that describe the relationships among economic development environmental quality and public health using panel data from 30 chinese provinces for the period from y2002 to y2014 the model verified the negative effect of environmental pollution on public health moreover economic and social factors may also affect public health for instance real gdp per capita has a significant negative impact on perinatal mortality rates and education and medical conditions also contribute significantly to promoting economic growth and improving the level of public health

grossman s missing health threshold we present a generalized solution to grossman s model of health capital 1972 relaxing the widely used assumption that individuals can adjust their health stock instantaneously to an optimal level without adjustment costs the grossman model then predicts the existence of a health threshold above which individuals do not demand medical care our generalized solution addresses a significant criticism the model s prediction that health and medical care are positively related is consistently rejected by the data we suggest structural and reduced form equations to test our generalized solution and contrast the predictions of the model with the empirical literature

healthy bodies and thick wallets the dual relation between health and economic status there is abundant evidence of a quantitatively large association between many measures of economic status including income and wealth and a variety of health outcomes such as mortality or morbidity however considerable and often heated debate remains especially across disciplines about the direction of causation and about why the association arises although medical scientists are often convinced that the dominant if not exclusive pathway is that variation in socioeconomic status produces health disparities they are increasingly debating among themselves about why low economic status might lead to poor health at least for modern industrial countries 1 the old standby arguments the less well to do have access to less or lower quality medical care or a stronger pattern of deleterious personal behaviors have been rejected as insufficient instead a series of intriguing competing theories have arisen that emphasize long term impacts of early childhood or even inter uterine environmental factors the cumulative effects of prolonged exposures to individual stressful events or reactions to macro societal factors such as rising levels of income inequality a common link is that each theory attempts to document the physiological processes through which low economic status leads to poorer health while these scientific questions are extremely important this research has taken place with little input from economists economists are now making contributions about the alternative pathway the impact poor health may have on economic resources poor health may restrict a family s capacity to earn income or to accumulate assets by limiting work or by raising medical expenses at a minimum this work should provide a caution against exaggerating the magnitude of causation from economic status to health outcomes but the potential contribution runs deeper as people age the evolving variation in individual health outcomes may offer additional statistical information to estimate parameters of household savings and consumption behavior that so far have proven to be somewhat elusive thus incorporating health uncertainty and risk into economic models should eventually enrich our understanding of basic tenets of household behavior the first section of this paper documents the size of the association between health and one prominent economic status measure household wealth section two deals with how health influences economic status by sketching out reasons why health may alter household savings and eventually wealth and then providing estimates of the empirical magnitude of these effects section three shifts attention to the alternative pathway the links between economic status and health and summarizes 2major controversies and evidence surrounding these issues

valuing morbidity an integration of the willingness to pay and health status index literatures placing dollar values on human health has long been a controversial aspect of policy analysis and remains difficult given the relatively small number of morbidity valuation studies available by combining both the economic and health literature this paper offers an alternative approach to morbidity valuation and provides estimates for a wide range of short term health conditions

long run returns to education does schooling lead to an extended old age while there is no doubt that health is strongly correlated with education whether schooling exerts a causal impact on health is not firmly established we exploit a dutch compulsory schooling law to estimate the causal effect of education on mortality the reform provides a powerful instrument significantly raising years of schooling which in turn has a significant and robust negative effect on mortality for men surviving to age 81 an extra year of schooling is estimated to reduce the probability of dying before the age of 89 by almost three percentage points relative to a baseline of 50 percent

can energy price regulations smooth price fluctuations evidence from china s coal sector abstract due to the dominance of coal in china s energy mix coal prices have always been a challenging part of pricing reform the recent frequent government interventions raise the key research questions what is the actual impact of price policies on coal price fluctuations and how can forward looking pricing policies be made by proposing a novel classification of coal pricing policies and introducing an expectation and forward looking coefficient the paper examines the relationship between coal price fluctuations and pricing policies using the generalized method of moments gmm method it shows that the lagging coal price and coal demand play a positive role in regulating coal prices while coal supply and marketization have significantly negative effects on coal price fluctuations the heterogeneous impacts of price policies are due to differences in market players expectations policy instruments and the methods of policy release in addition china s coal pricing policy portfolio from 2013 to 2016 exerted synergy effects on the restraint of coal price fluctuations as the forward looking coefficient was considerably low the government s intervention behaviors were obviously biased towards ex post facto responses the paper suggests short run and long run policies to advance marketization of coal prices amid the energy transition

the determinants of the demand for private health insurance under medicare since the introduction of medicare in 1984 the proportion of the australian population with private health insurance has declined considerably insurance for health care consumption is compulsory for the public health sector but optional for the private health sector in this paper we explore a number of important issues in the demand for private health insurance in australia the socio economic variables which influence demand are examined using a binary logit model a number of simulations are performed to highlight the influence and relative importance of various characteristics such as age income health status and geographical location on demand a number of important policy issues in the private health insurance market are highlighted first evidence is provided of adverse selection in the private health insurance pool second the notion of the wealthy uninsured is refuted and finally it is confirmed that there are significant interstate differences in the demand for private health insurance

the family as the health producer when spouses act strategically the grossman model has been extended recently in order to take account of the fact that most people lead their lives in a family using frameworks in which family members respectively a have common preferences and b are nash bargainers these models however do not consider individual incentives for behaving strategically in the model presented in this paper spouses interact strategically both in the production of own health and in the production of health of other family members we analyse inter alia the impact on the distribution of health of changes in family policies such as child allowance and custody rules

uncertainty inequalities in health and the demand for health abstract as it has become increasingly recognized that inequalities in health stem more from inequalities in wealth rather than from inequalities in access to medical care economists have begun to suggest that michael grossman s model of the demand for health may be a useful analytical framework for investigating the issue ironically the more popular of grossman s two sub models the pure investment model provides little by way of insights into the relationship between inequalities in wealth and inequalities in health in common with other pure investment models of human capital formation grossman s model predicts that an individual s health investment decisions at each stage in the lifecycle will be independent of his initial wealth this paper shows that if uncertainty is introduced into the model this result no longer holds it also shows that if individuals display decreasing absolute risk aversion wealthier individuals will invest more in health capital than individuals who start life with relatively small stocks of financial capital

valuing changes in health risks a comparison of alternative measures essential to efficient provision of health safety and the environment is correct valuation of risks to human health in a world of scarcity difficult decisions concerning tradeoffs between health and other desirables are unavoidable in this paper we develop a model of health investment under uncertainty which yields a general expression for values of changes in risks to human health the preference based values of morbidity risks and mortality risks are ex ante dollar equivalents of changes in expected utility associated with risk changes the preference based values are related to two alternative measures costs of illness and preventive expenditures which are thought to be lower bounds on the value of risk reductions we demonstrate that these alternative measures are not even special cases of the more general measure and that the size relationships among the three measures are complex also we derive the relationship between the willingness to pay for risk changes and the consumer surpluses associated with health changes which occur with certainty the next section contains a brief review of the approaches to valuing changes in health

the demand for health some new empirical evidence this paper presents some new estimates of the pure investment and pure consumption models of the demand for health in contrast to previous studies the paper presents parameter estimates of both reduced form and structural demand for health care equations the latter which are obtained by treating health capital as a latent variable in a recursive equation system provide a safer way of checking the consistency of the model s predictions with the data the present analysis of the pure consumption model differs from previous analyses in its recognition of the dependency of the shadow price of initial assets on the entire lifetime profiles of the model s exogenous variables the paper also explores the implications in terms of reliability of parameter estimates of the failure on the part of previous studies to recognize this

a model of declining health and retirement the declining u s average retirement age has been difficult to reconcile with cross section evidence that poor health is a primary cause of early retirement this paper reconciles those observations by building a grossman type model of investment in health distinguished from its predecessor by a more formal treatment of initial conditions a discontinuous mid life increase in health investment retirement is shown in general to be part of the optimal investment strategy time series productivity increases are shown to lower the optimal retirement age while varying health endowments and depreciation rates are shown to be able to account for cross section retirement age variations

on adaptation and the demand for health the purpose of this paper is to analyse the impacts of adaptation to failing health this is done by integrating adaptation processes in a grossman type of pure consumption model model simulations show that adaptation affects the health variables by lowering the incentives to invest in health as well as smoothing the optimal health stock path over the life cycle whether or not the risk of mortality is an object of choice has important effects when studying adaptation as well as for the joint development of the health variables

demand for health a generalised grossman model the demand for health and medical care is analysed within a generalised grossman type health investment model its underlying assumptions are shown to differ from those employed earlier in a manner which avoids some of the criticisms levelled at grossman s model the comparative static predictions of the generalised model are examined and it is demonstrated that most previous health investment models are derivable from it also the present model is applicable to a new wider range of problems thus increasing the scope of economic explanations of health behaviour

estimating stated preferences with rated pair data environmental health and employment effects of energy programs abstract respondents stated preferences for attributes related to various electricity generation scenarios are analyzed using a series of pairwise ratings multiple observations for each respondent facilitate estimating individual scale parameters scale estimates can identify uninformative rating patterns and make it possible to delete such observations or adjust wtp calculations cross section time series analysis of the data indicates that nonprice attributes increase in salience during the course of the experiment thus later responses may be better indicators of preferences than earlier responses comparisons of polychotomous with dichotomous models indicate that most respondents relative preference ratings are not simply dichotomous but discriminate systematically along the rating scale