This paper reports an analysis of the evolution of equity in access to health care in Spain over the period 1987-2001, a time span covering the development of the modern Spanish National Health System. Our measures of access are the probabilities of visiting a doctor, using emergency services...

This paper shows how recently developed regression-based methods for the decomposition of health inequality can be extended to incorporate individual heterogeneity in the responses of health to the explanatory variables. We illustrate our method with an application to the Canadian NPHS of 1994....

Internationally comparable panel data from the full eight waves of the ECHP are used to study the effects of health on retirement in nine EU countries. Self-reported retirement is compared to a broader measure of inactivity. Measures of health include two latent stock measures, one that is...

The ECHP is used to analyse the utilisation of health care in Europe. We estimate a new latent class hurdle model for panel data and compare it with the latent class NegBin model and the standard hurdle model. Latent class specifications outperform the standard hurdle model but the latent class...

This paper presents new international comparative evidence on the factors driving inequalities in the use of GP and specialist services in 12 EU member states. The data are taken from the 1996 wave of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). We examine two types of utilisation (the...

This paper presents a method to compare indices of inequality in health that are based on short-run and long-run measures of health and income. For pure health inequality (as measured by the Gini coefficient) and income-related health inequality (as measured by the concentration index), we show...

A decade ago, Newhouse (1987) assessed the balance of trade between imports from the econometrics literature into health economics, and exports from health economics to a wider audience. While it is undoubtedly true that imports of concepts and techniques still dominate the balance, the...

This paper considers the determinants of a binary indicator for the existence of functional limitations using seven waves (1991–1997) of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). The focal point of our analysis is the contributions of state dependence, heterogeneity and serial correlation in...

The literature on the effects of public smoking bans on smoking behaviour presents conflicting results and there is limited evidence on their impact on active smoking. This paper evaluates the impact of smoking bans on active smoking using data from the British Household Panel Survey and...

Measurement of inequity in health care delivery has focused on the extent to which health care utilisation is or is not distributed according to need, irrespective of income. Studies using cross-sectional data have proposed various ways of measuring and standardizing for need, but inevitably...