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....

The latest CEP Election Analysis, published jointly with LSE Health, gives an overview of the research evidence on UK healthcare, one of the key battlegrounds of the 2010 General Election.

Prophylactic vaccines for human papillomavirus (HPV) are being introduced in many countries for the prevention of cervical cancer, the second most important cause of cancer-related death in women globally. This is likely to have a significant impact on the future burden of cervical cancer,...

This paper explores the changing role of government involvement in health care financing policy outside the United States. It provides a review of the economics literature in this area to elucidate the implications of recent policy changes on efficiency, costs, and quality. Our review reveals...

This paper studies how patent rights and price regulation affect how fast new drugs are launched in different countries, using newly constructed data on launches of 642 new drugs in 76 countries for the period 1983-2002, and information on the duration and content of patent and price control...

Recently attention has begun to focus not only on assessing the effectiveness of interventions to tackle mental health problems, but also on measures to prevent physical co-morbidity. Individuals with mental health problems are at significantly increased risk of chronic physical health problems,...

A systematic review was conducted to determine the extent to which an economic case has been made in high-income countries for investment in interventions to promote mental health and well-being. We focused on areas of interest to the DataPrev project: early years and parenting interventions,...

Research on HIV infection and sexual behaviour in sub-Saharan Africa typically focuses on individuals aged 15–49 years, under the assumption that both become less relevant for older individuals. We test this assumption using data from rural Malawi to compare sexual behaviour and HIV infection...

Improving accountability in public services has been a central objective of many public sector reforms in recent years. Chief among these have been efforts to generate observable performance measures as a basis for monitoring performance. This paper examines a natural experiment in regimes...