We explore what health-capital theory has to offer in terms of informing and directing research into health inequality. We argue that economic theory can help in identifying mechanisms through which specific socioeconomic indicators and health interact. Our reading of the literature, and our own...

The concentration index and decomposition analysis are commonly used in economics to measure and explain socioeconomic inequalities in health. Such analysis builds on the strong assumption that a health production function can be estimated without substantial bias implying that health is caused...

While many of the measurement approaches in health inequality measurement assume the existence of a ratio-scale variable,most of the health information available in population surveys is given in the form of categorical variables. Therefore, the well-known inequality indices may not always be...

Access to public health care has often been equated with health outcomes. Outcomes-based analysis often misunderstands the process of access to health. This article conceives access to health as a bundled concept and decomposes access into availability, affordability and acceptability. Access to...

Health equality is an important objective in public healthcare systems, and still, we see substantial socio-economic differences. Using high-quality administrative data from Upper Austria, we analyze the socio-economic gradient in mortality and healthcare utilization following a cancer...

With the economic crisis, the fight against unemployment in most countries 1 is coetaneous to the need to restrain public expenditure in closing budget deficits. As a consequence, spending cuts have started to affect a large number of decisions that directly or indirectly may be expected to have...

Attention has been given recently to the Concentration Index; specifically, corrected versions have been generated that supersede the original with properties such as transform invariance, reversal invariance and transfer invariance. While previous studies have promoted a transformed or...

This paper tests two competing hypotheses on the relationship between age, SES, and health inequality at the cohort/population level. The accumulation hypothesis predicts that levels of SES- based health inequality and consequently overall health inequality within a cohort progressively increase...

This research uses a time-based approach of the causal relationship (Granger-like)between health and social capital for older people in Europe. We use panel data from waves 1 and 2 of SHARE (the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe)for the analysis. Additional wave 3 data on...

The Italian health care system is managed mainly at the regional level. For this reasonhealth care may differ depending on region of residence. The aim of this note is to take a rigorous ex ante approach and test for equality of health opportunities as opposed to health outcomes, which are the...