The concentration index is widely used to measure income-related inequality in health. No insight exists, however, whether the concentration index connects with people's preferences about distributions of income and health and whether a reduction in the concentration index reflects an increase...

This article discusses measurement of socioeconomic inequalities in the prevalence of a health condition, in response to the recent exchange between Guido Erreygers and Adam Wagstaff, in which they discuss the merits of their own corrections to the frequently used concentration index. We first...

Research in the health sciences reports persistent racial differences in health care access, utilization, and outcomes. This study investigates three potential sources of these disparities – differential quality of care, physician discrimination, and patient response to therapy. It uses a...

In several economic fields, such as those related to health or education, the individuals’ characteristics are measured by bounded variables. Accordingly, these characteristics may be indistinctly represented by achievements or shortfalls. A difficulty arises when inequality needs to be...

In this paper we discuss the prioritisation of healthcare projects where there is a concern about health inequalities, but the decision maker is reluctant to make explicit quantitative value judgements and the data systems only allow the measurement of health at an aggregate level. Our analysis...

New regulation of health insurance markets creates multiple levels of health plans, with designations like “Gold” and “Silver.” The underlying rationale for the heavy-metal approach to insurance regulation is that heterogeneity in demand for health care is not only due to health status...

The attitudes of the general British population towards Muslims changed post 2001, and this change led to a significant increase in Anti-Muslim discrimination. We use this exogenous attitude change to estimate the causal impact of increased discrimination on a range of objective and subjective...

The long-standing inverse relationship between education and mortality strengthened substantially at the end of the 20th century. This paper examines the reasons for this increase. We show that behavioral risk factors are not of primary importance. Smoking declined more for the better educated,...

We propose a method of measuring and decomposing inequity in health care utilisation that allows for heterogeneity in the use–need relationship. This makes explicit inequity that derives from unequal treatment response to variation in need, as well as that due to differential effects of...