<p>This thesis focuses on two important areas of health economics: health dynamics during pre-adulthood, and physician behaviour. The first two essays seek to explore the important factors that determine the health production process during the period of pre-adulthood. The third chapter then turns the focus to physician labour and service provision behaviours.</p> <p>The first chapter examines the impact of family social economic status (SES) and neighbourhood environment on the dynamics of child <em>physical</em> health development. It examines the distribution of health outcomes and health transitions and explores the determinants of these distributions by estimating the contributions of family SES, neighbourhood status, unobserved heterogeneity and pure state dependence.</p> <p>The second chapter extends the research on health development in pre-adulthood by examining the roles of family SES, early childhood life-events, unobserved heterogeneity and pure state dependence in explaining the distribution of depression among adolescents and young adults. It also explicitly models the depression dynamics and quantifies both the mobility and persistence of this type of <em>mental</em> health problem from adolescence to early adulthood.</p> <p>The third chapter examines whether and how pay-for-performance (P4P) payments can motivate physician service provision to improve the quality of health care. It exploits a natural experiment in the province of Ontario, Canada to identify empirically the impact of P4P incentives on the provision of targeted primary care services, and whether physicians’ responses differ by age, practice size and baseline compliance level.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This dissertation consists of three essays on econometric analysis including both parametric and nonparametric econometrics. The first chapter outlines three topics involved and briefly discusses the motivations and methods, as well as some conclusions in each of the following chapters. Both chapter 2 and chapter 3 are in the field of kernel smoothed nonparametric econometrics. Chapter 2 conducts large volumes of simulations to explore the properties of various methods proposed in the literature to detect irrelevant variables in a fully nonparametric regression framework. We focus our attention to two broadly sets of methods, the least square cross-validated bandwidth selection procedure and the conventional nonparametric significance testing frameworks. In chapter 3, a bootstrap test statistic is proposed to test the validity of imposing some arbitrary restrictions on higher order derivatives of a regression function. We use data sharpening method to enforce the desired constraints on the shape of the conditional means and then measure the distance between the unrestricted and restricted models. The empirical distribution of the test statistic is generated by bootstrapping and the asymptotic distribution for the bootstrap test statistic is also provided. The last chapter examines the relationship between population health and income inequality in China. We use a multilevel dynamic panel model to test the absolute income hypothesis, various versions of relative income hypothesis, and health selection hypothesis empirically / Ph. D.