Health status varies across socio-economic groups and health status is generally assumed to predict health care needs. Therefore the need for health care varies across socio-economic groups, and studies of equity in the distribution of health care between socio-economic groups must compare...

In several countries formulae for allocating resources to regions are derived using national average relationships between population characteristics and health service use. However, there may be significant regional heterogeneity in health care delivery which, has two main implications for a...

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...

Illicit market activities are associated with considerable financial and psychological harms for drug users and third parties, and impose significant demands on public services. Since policy interventions interact with the market, evaluations of cost-effectiveness necessitate knowledge of how...

Levels of alcohol consumption tend to be similar for individuals living in the same household. This may be because: (a) individuals with similar characteristics collect in households (correlated effects); (b) individuals in the same household are influenced by common factors (exogenous effects);...

Patterns of self-reported morbidity and general practitioner (GP) utilization exhibit complex age, sex and time heterogeneity. Underlying patterns are often obscured by data which are overly 'rough' because of noise associated with adjacent year fluctuations. In this paper we describe methods to...