Objectives The UK's National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has an explicit cost-effectiveness threshold for deciding whether or not services are to be provided in the National Health Service (NHS), but there is currently little evidence to support the level at which it is...

There is a widely discussed problem of publication bias in medical and health services research. Where quantitative effects form the basis of a publication a ‘winner's curse’ curse may apply. This phenomenon may occur as prospective authors of research papers compete by reporting ‘more...

The persistence of socioeconomic inequalities in health is a major policy concern in England, which was addressed by the new labour government in 1997 which prioritised curtailing health inequalities as a policy goal. This paper addresses two related questions: first, it empirically examines the...