Little is known about what the economic crisis has done to health disparities by income. We apply a decomposition method to unravel the contributions of income growth, income inequality and differential income mobility across socio-demographic groups to changes in health disparities by income in...

I apply Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage to a theory of factor substitutability in a model with a continuum of worker and job types. Highly skilled workers have a comparative advantage in complex jobs. The model satisfies the distance-dependent elasticity of substitution (DIDES)...

There is a concern that ordered responses on health questions may differ acrosspopulations or even across subgroups of a population. This reporting heterogeneity mayinvalidate group comparisons and measures of health inequality. This paper proposes a test fordifferential reporting in ordered...

Measurement of inequity in health care delivery has focused on the extent to which health care utilisation is or is not distributed according to need, irrespective of income. Studies using cross-sectional data have proposed various ways of measuring and standardizing for need, but inevitably...

Europe aims at combining income growth with improvements in social cohesion as measured by income and health inequalities. We show that, theoretically, both aims can be reconciled only under very specific conditions concerning the type of growth and the income responsiveness of health. We...

We study the effects of competition in a context in which people's actions can not be contractually fixed. We find that in such an environment the very presence of competition does neither increase efficiency nor does it yield any payoff gains for the short side of the market. We also find that...

Heterogeneity in reporting of health by socio-economic and demographic characteristics potentially biases the measurement of health disparities. We use anchoring vignettes to identify socio-demographic differences in the reporting of health in Indonesia, India and China. Homogeneous reporting by...

An age-cohort decomposition applied to panel data identifies how the mean, overall inequality and income-related inequality of self-assessed health evolve over the life cycle and differ across generations in 11 EU countries. There is a moderate and steady decline in mean health until the age of...

While there is no doubt that health is strongly correlated with education, whether schooling exerts a causal impact on health is not yet firmly established. We exploit Dutch compulsory schooling laws in a Regression Discontinuity Design applied to linked data from health surveys, tax files and...

A strong relationship between health and socioeconomic status is firmly established. Yet, partly due to the multidimensional and dynamic nature of the variables, the causal mechanisms connecting them are poorly understood. This paper argues that adoption of a life-cycle perspective is essential...