ABSTRACT Evidence suggests that maternal and offspring smoking behaviour is correlated. Little is known about the mechanisms through which this intergenerational transfer occurs. This paper explores the role of time preferences. Although time preference is likely to be heritable and correlated...

The World Health Report 2000 focuses on the performance of health-care systems around the globe. The report uses efficiency measurement techniques to create a league table of health-care systems, highlighting good and bad performers. Efficiency is measured using panel data methods. This paper...

ABSTRACT The elicitation of societal views about healthcare priority setting is an important, contemporary research area, and there are a number of studies that apply either qualitative techniques or quantitative preference elicitation methods. However, there are methodological challenges in...

In this paper we use relative distributions to examine changes in the distribution of the body mass index (BMI) in England and Canada during the period 1994|5-2000|1. The use of relative distributions allows us to describe changes in the whole distribution of the BMI in a non-parametric fashion....

The World Health Organisation's (WHO) approach to the measurement of health system efficiency is briefly described. Four arguments are then presented. First, equity of finance should not be a criterion for the evaluation of a health system and, more generally, the same objectives and importance...

The relative income hypothesis, that relative income has a direct effect on individual health, has become an important part of the literature on health inequalities. This paper presents a four-quadrant diagram, which shows the effect of income, relative income and aggregation bias on individual...