This paper examines whether or not hospital competition in a market with fixed reimbursement prices can prompt improvements in clinical quality. In January 2006, the British Government introduced a major extension of their market-based reforms to the English National Health Service. From January...

Recent work in psychology and economics has investigated ways in which individuals experience their lives. This literature includes influences on individuals’ momentary happiness. We contribute to this literature using a new data source, Mappiness (www.mappiness.org.uk), which permits...

Within the Social Representations Theory (SRT) paradigm, social representations are defined technically as practical social knowledge that is produced when groups and individuals encounter the unfamiliar. Social representations therefore function to familiarise the unfamiliar. Theorists also...

Objectives To provide counterevidence to existing literature on healer shopping in Africa through a systematic analysis of illness practices by Ghanaians with diabetes; to outline approaches towards improving patient centred health care and policy development regarding diabetes in Ghana. Design...

Current debates about the sustainability of public commitments include discussion of the adequacy and affordability of collective health and social care responses to the rapidly growing needs of ageing communities. A recurrent theme in England is whether communities can play greater roles in...

Richard Layard has spent much of his professional life tackling unemployment and inequality. But in his latest work, he argues that mental illness is now Britain's biggest social problem.

This paper evaluates the effect of smoking bans in public places on the exposure to tobacco smoke of non-smokers and contrasts it with the effect of excise taxes. Exploiting data on cotinine - a metabolite of nicotine - as well as state and time variation in anti-smoking policies across US...

Epidemics are often modeled using non-linear dynamical systems observed through partial and noisy data. In this paper, we consider stochastic extensions in order to capture unknown influences (changing behaviors, public interventions, seasonal effects, etc.). These models assign diffusion...

We use British panel data to determine the exogenous impact of income on a number of individual health outcomes: general health status, mental health, physical health problems, and health behaviors (drinking and smoking). Lottery winnings allow us to make causal statements regarding the effect...