This paper reviews the extent to which policy interventions can affect risky behaviours such as smoking, drinking and diet. The justification for such intervention is typically a market failure, broadly defined. The types of market failure typically encountered are discussed. First and second...

Numerous studies have evaluated the effect of nutrition early in life on health much later in life by comparing individuals born during a famine to others. Nutritional intake is typically unobserved and endogenous, whereas famines arguably provide exogenous variation in the provision of...

Comparing self-assessed indicators of subjective outcomes such as health, work disability, political efficacy, job satisfaction, etc. across countries or socio-economic groups is often hampered by the fact that different groups use systematically different response scales. Anchoring vignettes...

We introduce two simple new variants of the Jackknife Instrumental Variables (JIVE) estimator for overidentified linear models and show that they are superior to the existing JIVE estimator, significantly improving on its small sample bias properties. We also compare our new estimators to...

Education yields substantial non-monetary benefits, but the size of these gains is still debated. Previous studies, for example, report contradictory effects of education and compulsory schooling on mortality – ranging from zero to large mortality reductions. Using data from 19 compulsory...

The treatment of owner-occupied housing costs is a recurring problem in the construction of consumer price indices, and there are competing methodologies. In the most widely-used Irish index, the Payments Approach, which attaches a weight to a term involving historical house prices and an...

Smoking, low physical activity and frequent alcohol consumption may have substantial health risks in terms of disease, quality of life and mortality. Understanding inequality in relation to these behaviours among older people is important in the context of a rapidly ageing population. In this...