Policy towards asylum seekers has been a controversial topic for more than a decade. Rising numbers of asylum applications have been met with ever-tougher policies to deter them. Following a period of policy harmonisation, the EU has reached a crucial stage in the development of a new Common...

Australia’s policies towards asylum seekers hit the headlines when it refused to admit those aboard the Tampa in September 2001. This tough stance and the raft of legislation that followed became known as Australia’s ‘Pacific Solution’. It was clearly intended to deter those who might...

We examine the health and height of men born in England and Wales in the 1890s who enlisted in the army at the time of the First World War. We take a sample of the army service records and use this information to find the recruits as children in the 1901 census. Econometric results indicate that...

This paper explores reporting bias and heterogeneity in the measure of self-assessed health (SAH) used in the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). The ninth wave of the BHPS includes the SF-36 general health questionnaire, which incorporates a different wording to the self-assessed health...

Increases in human stature are seen as a key indicator of improvement in the average health of populations. The literature associates stature with a variety of socioeconomic variables, and much of the focus is on the nineteenth century and on the last 50 years. In this paper I present and...

The first half of the twentieth century saw rapid improvements in the health and height of British children. Average height and health can be related to infant mortality through a positive selection effect and a negative scarring effect. Examining town-level panel data on the heights of school...

The first half of the twentieth century saw rapid improvements in the health and height of British children. Average height and health can be related to infant mortality through a positive selection effect and a negative scarring effect. Examining town-level panel data on the heights of school...

This paper explores reporting bias and heterogeneity in the measure of self-assessed health (SAH) used in the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). The ninth wave of the BHPS includes the SF-36 general health questionnaire, which incorporates a different wording to the self-assessed health...

The gateway, or stepping stone, hypothesis is important as it has had considerable influence on drug policy and legislation in many countries. The gateway hypothesis offers one possible explanation for young people's development of a serious drug problem. It simply states that the use of one...

as absolute levels in explaining the education-health gradient. We show that relative education impacts smoking, when direct utility is relative, or when there is signalling in the labour market. We use data from the "Enquête sur les Conditions de Vie des Ménages 2001" and a major reform of...