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We examine the relationship between total mortality, deaths due to motor vehicle accidents, cardiovascular disease and measures of business cycles for the USA, using a time-varying parameter model for the periods 1961-2010. We first present a theoretical model to outline the transmission mechanism from business cycles to health status, to motivate our empirical framework and to explain why the relationship between mortality and the economy may have changed over time. We find overwhelming evidence of structural breaks in the relationship between mortality and business cycles over the sample period. Overall, the relationship between total mortality, cardiovascular mortality and the economy has become less procyclical over time and even countercyclical in recent times for certain age groups. Deaths due to motor vehicle accidents have remained strongly procyclical. Using drugs and medical patent data and data on hours worked, we argue that important advances in medical technology and changes in the effects that working hours have on health are important reasons for this time-varying relationship. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Employing provincial data from 1979 to 2004 allows us to exploit the significant (45 percent to 60 percent) reduction in excise taxes in Eastern Canada enacted in February 1994 to estimate the impacts of cigarette taxes on birth outcomes. Empirical estimates suggest that an increase in cigarette taxes is significantly associated with lower infant mortalities. However, we also find some evidence of a counter-intuitive positive correlation between taxes and fetal deaths. Overall, conditional on methodology, we find increased lagged per capita health expenditures and the number of physicians to be significantly associated with improvements in birth outcomes.

It is difficult to estimate the biomedical determinants of life expectancy using aggregate data. Analyses using individual level data or perhaps disease-specific data will probably produce more compelling results.

INTRODUCTION Electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) use among youth is common, and so efforts to regulate its use and availability are continually being made. The school environment represents an important domain for advancing health policy among youth populations. This study examines the impact of school-based e-cigarette control policies on student e-cigarette use in the context of a natural experiment. METHODS Using three years of longitudinal student and school level data (2013/2014 to 2015/2016), from a sample of 69 secondary schools in Ontario, Canada, a generalized estimating equation approach examined the impact of school-based e-cigarette control policy changes on the prevalence of youth e-cigarette use. The main outcome of interest was current e-cigarette use, while covariates included age, gender, ethnicity, and amount of spending money in dollars per week the student has. Tests of proportion (t-tests) were used to examine whether there were any significant differences in the changes for each intervention school relative to the sample of schools that report no changes in school-level e-cigarette control policies. RESULTS Estimates from the generalized estimating equation approach suggest that students had lower odds of using e-cigarettes in schools where an e-cigarette control policy was implemented. That is, the e-cigarette control policy decreased the adjusted odds of being an e-cigarette user (OR=0.68; 95% CI: 0.48–0.97). Examining school-specific impact, at four of six schools that had an e-cigarette control policy, the ban on the use of e-cigarettes may have lowered the prevalence of e-cigarette use. CONCLUSIONS This is the first study to use longitudinal data to study school-level e-cigarette use and the impact of e-cigarette control policy. These results provide new evidence that school-level policies banning the use of e-cigarettes on school property may be effective in reducing e-cigarette use (or preventing it) in their current form, as seen in this natural experiment.