What is soil? Where does soil come from? What is special about soil in Africa? What does soil provide to society and the environment? How do our activities affect soil? The first ever Soil Atlas of Africa uses striking maps, informative texts and stunning photographs to answer and explain these...

Understanding the data generating process behind healthcare costs remains a key empirical issue. Although much research to date has focused on the prediction of the conditional mean cost, this can potentially miss important features of the full conditional distribution such as tail...

This paper extends the literature on modelling healthcare cost data by applying the Generalised Beta of the Second Kind (GB2) distribution to UK data. A quasi-experimental design, estimating models on a subset of the data and evaluating performance on another subset, is used to compare this...

This paper investigates the relationships between social circumstances, individual behaviours, and ill-health later in life, with a particular focus on the development of cancer. A discrete latent factor model incorporating individuals' smoking and health outcomes (lifespan and time-to-cancer)...

Members of the National Child Development Study (NCDS) cohort attended very different types of secondary school, as their schooling lay within the transition period of the comprehensive education reform in England and Wales. This provides a natural setting to explore the impact of educational...