Emergency foodbanks have become an increasingly prominent and controversial feature of austerity in Europe and the USA. In the UK, foodbanks have been called a ‘public health emergency’. Despite this, there has been no UK research examining the health of foodbank users. Through an...

The recent global recession and concurrent rise in job loss makes unemployment insurance (UI) increasingly important to smooth patterns of consumption and keep households from experiencing extreme material poverty. In this paper, we undertake a realist review to produce a critical understanding...

It is increasingly understood that the physical environment remains an important determinant of area-level health and spatial and socioeconomic health inequalities. Existing research has largely focused on the health effects of differential access to green space, the proximity of waste...

Epidemiological studies have consistently shown that population health varies significantly by welfare state regime. However, these studies have focused exclusively on the welfare states of Europe, North America and Australasia. This focus ignores the existence of welfare states in other parts...

Welfare-to-work programmes promoting employment of people with a disability or chronic illness are an expanding aspect of welfare reform in the UK. What evidence is there of impact on employment outcomes? This paper presents a systematic review of the evidence on UK policy initiatives. Both...

The aim of this study was to determine the degree to which welfare state regime characteristics explained the proportional variation of self-perceived health between European countries, when individual and regional variation was accounted for, by undertaking a multilevel analysis of the European...

Previous studies have identified an area-level association between socio-economic deprivation and poorer population health. However, some recent studies have suggested that some areas exhibit better health outcomes than would be expected given their level of deprivation. This has been...

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...

There has been much informal speculation on how changes in economic circumstances contribute to partnership dissolution; however there has been little empirical work testing these speculations. This paper aims to shed light on how micro level factors such as receiving a financial windfall and...

The obesity epidemic has received widespread media and research attention. However, the social phenomenon of obesity is still not well understood. Data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) show positive and significant correlations in spousal body mass index (<italic>BMI</italic>). This article...