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...

Smoking bans in public places are considered an important public health intervention. The impact of such bans on health, and especially self-reported health, has not been widely considered in the literature. This paper investigates the impact of a public smoking ban on self-reported health...

Attempts to test the relative deprivation hypothesis, that income inequality affects individual health, are subject to the aggregation problem. Waldmann (Quarterly Journal of Economics 107, 1992) ingeniously attempts to overcome the difficulty by using income data for the poor and the share of...

Ageing populations are a major challenge for most developed countries, where social security systems were developed in the post war period. It has been suggested that the costs of caring for the ageing population places a considerable strain on individuals, as well as on the public purse, and...

Twin births are often used as an instrument for fertility in models investigating the impact of family size on labour market and child outcomes. However, a large share of twin births (24% in our sample) are the result of fertility treatments, potentially causing twin births to be endogenous and...

Twin births are often used to instrument for fertility when investigating the impact of family size on labor market outcomes. In this paper we consider two econometric problems both related to the link between fertility treatments and multiple births. The first is the potential for omitted...

We propose a theoretical explanation for the so-called “beauty premium”. Our explanation is based entirely on search frictions and the fact that physical appearance plays an important role in attracting a marriage partner. We analyse the interaction between frictional labour and marriage...

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...