Has the introduction of greater choice and competition in healthcare in England led to improved outcomes for patients? The authors assess changes in the quality of care that hospitals provided for cardiac surgery patients following the mid-2000s reforms.

The impacts of choice in public services are controversial. We exploit a reform in the English National Health Service to assess the impact of relaxing constraints on patient choice. We estimate a demand model to evaluate whether increased choice increased demand elasticity faced by hospitals...

Why do over 20% of children die in some poor countries, while in others only 2% die? We examine this question using survey data covering 278,000 children in 45 low-income countries. We find that parents' education and a mother's propensity to seek out modern healthcare are empirically important...

Personal Social Health and Economic (PSHE) education is a non-statutory school subject designed to facilitate the delivery of a number of key competencies relevant to health, safety and wellbeing. As well as contributing to learning objectives in regards to these topics PSHE education has been...

We employ the EU KLEMS database to estimate the real rate of return to capital in 14 countries (11 in the EU, three outside the EU) in 10 branches of the market economy plus the market economy as a whole. Our measure of capital is an aggregate over seven types of asset: three ICT assets...

Does the fear of being bullied in childhood affect people's resilience to adverse life events they may face in adulthood? The author investigates whether the 'scarring' effects are particularly damaging to individuals who lose their job.

This paper investigates whether people's ability to withstand and adapt to one of the most important economic shocks - job loss - is determined early on in childhood. Using nationally representative longitudinal data that tracks almost 3,000 children into adulthood, we show that the negative...