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In recent years, work in health economics econometrics has grown dramatically. Numerous micro and macro data sets are now available, but the analysis of these data requires a combination of a good command of the tools and an understanding of economic behaviour regarding health and health care. Health economics is an important and challenging area of research for econometricians because of the complexity of the data, arising from problems such as non-linearity of the models or the presence of unobserved heterogeneity for example.
At the HEPL, we apply statistical and econometric methods to answer a wide range of health economics, insurance, public health, and epidemiology questions. We contribute to theoretical and methodological advances in terms of new identification strategies or advances in econometric modelling.
Controlling public expenditure on health care related to population ageing and growing health needs is one of the most pressing health policy objectives in UK and other high income countries. It is relatively well established that it’s the proximity to death, rather than age per se, which drives health care expenditure. There is an extensive literature on exploring end-of-life care costs, but these tend to focus on single health care setting, say hospital, or disease area, say cancer. Our study adds to this literature by exploiting linked health and local authority data and investigating the system-wide costs associated with the end-of-life period and explored patterns in end-of-life costs by care setting, age, time-to-death and death location.