We evaluate the impact of California Assembly Bill 394, which mandated maximum levels of patients per nurse in the hospital setting. When the law was passed, some hospitals already met the requirements, while others did not. Thus changes in staffing ratios from the pre- to post-mandate periods...

This paper explores whether state provision of school meals in the 1980s crowded out private provision by examining two UK policy reforms that dramatically reduced school meal take-up. The paper examines whether this affected children’s BMI, using a large, unique, longitudinal dataset of...

The use of genetic markers as instrumental variables (IV) is receiving increasing attention from epidemiologists, economists, statisticians and social scientists. This paper examines the conditions that need to be met for genetic variants to be used as instruments. Although these have been...

Height has long been recognised as associated with better outcomes: the question is whether this association is causal. We use children’s genetic variants as instrumental variables (IV) to deal with possible unobserved confounders and examine the effect of child and adolescent height on a wide...

The use of genetic markers as instrumental variables (IV) is receiving increasing attention from economists. This paper examines the conditions that need to be met for genetic variants to be used as instruments. We combine the IV literature with that from genetic epidemiology, with an...

This study investigates whether and why house prices matter for well-being. House prices may influence well-being via a wealth/access-to-credit mechanism, as a rise in prices increases housing wealth and the collateral value of a house, and via a relative concerns mechanism, if renters compare...

This paper examines the relationship between performance of English public sector hospitals (NHS trusts) and the quality of their nursing staff. Performance ratings of NHS trusts published in 2001 and 2002 indicate a clear regional divide. This divide is not explained by lower medical need. The...

A current policy issue is whether, and if so under what circumstances, insurance companies should be given access to genetic test results. The insurance industry argues for mandatory disclosure in order to avoid problems of adverse selection; genetic interest groups argue for a moratorium or...

Using a very local definition of neighbourhood, and characterising that neighbourhood along five relatively orthogonal dimensions based on the socio-economic characteristics of the population of the neighbourhood, this paper examines the association between neighbourhood and levels and changes...

In this paper, I examine the contribution that economics can make to our understanding of key issues in health and health care. In the first part of the paper, I argue that economics can bring valuable insights into the world of over-eating and present recent economic theories that argue that...