Can the rise in obesity among children be attributed to intergenerationally parental influences? How important is a parent’s socioeconomic status in accounting for the emergence of obesity among children? This paper documents evidence of an emerging social gradient of obesity in pre-school...

This paper estimates the impact of the BMI, obesity and overweight on direct medical costs. We apply panel data econometrics and use a two-part model with a longitudinal dataset of medical and administrative records of patients in primary and secondary healthcare centres in Spain followed up...

This paper analyses the extent to which peer influence on adolescent weight differs in a typical southern European country and in the United States, two geographical areas characterised by different economic, socio-cultural and environmental patterns. Our study is based on a survey of secondary...

The extent to which equality in the access to and the financing of health care reduces inequalities in health is a key question for health-care reform policy-making. Cross-country studies, when they exist suffer from marked comparability limitations due to data heterogeneity and differences...

Wide cross-country variation in obesity rates have been reported within European Union member states. However, health production determinants for these differences have been largely overlooked in the health economics literature. In this paper we propose a methodology for conducting standardized...

This paper computes first the internal rates of return of different population cohorts. Secondly, we study the intragenerational aspects by calculating the returns over life-time contributions for workers of different categories, grouped by earnings, gender and marital status. Under a set of...

This paper uses a combination of the 2006 Catalan Health and Health & Examination Surveys to compute the size of weight and height self-reporting biases. The underlying determinants of these self-reporting biases are also analysed, placing special emphasis on examining the role played by social...