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...

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.

We exploit lottery wins to investigate the effects of exogenous changes to individuals' income on health care demand in the United Kingdom. This strategy allows us to estimate lottery income elasticities for a range of health care services that are publicly and privately provided. The results...

Smoking bans have been widely introduced in recent years in an effort to reduce non-smokers' exposure to tobacco smoke. Jérôme Adda and Francesca Cornaglia evaluate the effect of these restrictions - and of taxes on cigarettes - on the incidence of passive smoking and, in particular, their...

Most estimates of the cost of crime focus on victims. Yet it is plausible that an even larger cost of crime occurs via its indirect impact on the mental wellbeing of non-victims. To test how crime affects individuals' mental outcomes, we exploit detailed panel data on mental wellbeing, allowing...

CEP research highlights the potential role of improving the quality of hospital management for raising productivity in the UK healthcare sector

Zack Cooper outlines evidence on the benefits of competition in healthcare - and the implications for the coalition government's NHS reform plans.

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...

This paper is a contribution to the second World Happiness Report. It makes five main points: 1. Mental health is the biggest single predictor of life-satisfaction. This is so in the UK, Germany and Australia even if mental health is included with a six-year lag. It explains more of the variance...

We examine the vertical transmission of overweight drawing upon a sample of English children, both adopted and non-adopted, and their families. Our results suggest strong evidence of an intergenerational association of overweight among adoptees, indicating transmission through cultural factors....