We study the health effects of the spread of democratic institutions and the extension of voting rights in 15 European countries since the middle of the nineteenth century. We employ both cross country and cohort variation in heights and employ a new instrument for democracy and the extension of...

Approaches to measuring health inequalities are often problematic in that they use methods that are inappropriate for categorical data. The approach here focuses on "pure" or univariate health inequality (rather than income-related or bivariate health inequality) and is based on a concept of...

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...

Traditional economic interpretations have not been successful in explaining differences in saving rates across countries. One hypothesis is that savings respond to cultural specific social norms. A seminal paper in economics (1) however did not find any effect of culture on savings. We revisit...

We study the effect of ageing, defined an extra year of life, on health care utilisation. We disentangle the direct effect of ageing, from other alternative explanations such as the presence of comorbidities and endogenous time to death (TTD) that are argued to absorb the effect of ageing (...

Uniform health care delivered by a mainstream public insurer - such as the National Health Service (NHS), seldom satisfies heterogeneous demands for care, and some unsatisfied share of the population either use private health care, or purchase private insurance (PHI). One potential mechanism to...

Understanding the malleability of gender norms is crucial to address gender inequalities. We study the effect of parenting daughters on a gender role attitude relating to the traditional male breadwinner model: whether the husband should earn and the wife stay at home. We control for other...

Although the rise in obesity and overweight is related to time constraints influencing health investments (e.g., exercise, shopping and cooking time, etc.), there is limited causal evidence to substantiate such claims. This paper estimates the causal effect of a change in working times on...

We show that sleep deprivation exerts strong negative effects on mothers' labour market performance. To isolate exogenous variations in maternal sleep, we exploit unique variations in child sleep disruption using a UK panel dataset that follows mother-child pairs through time. We find that...

We study the effect of demand-side subsidies to old age care recipients on both caregiving and intergenerational transfer decisions. We exploit two quasi-natural experiments referring to the inception of a universal and unconditional caregiving allowance in 2007 and its subsequent reduction in...