Government effectiveness has played an important role in tackling the crisis caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. This paper discusses the different aspects of government effectiveness in explaining the variation in the COVID-19 confirmed cases and death levels in Viet Nam. We use the...

Economists often rely on the infant mortality rate as an indicator of a country's health. Despite arguments about its relevance, uniform measurement of infant mortality is necessary. Using important socioeconomic indicators, we develop a method to adjust country-specific reported infant...

In this note we take a first look at the extent to which ethnic minorities in the UK maintain or diverge from the diet associated with their country of origin; and whether those who maintain their ethnic origin diet eat more or less healthily. We find that immigrants are more likely to eat food...

We examine the persistence of the association between subjective health assessments of both first and second-generation migrants with that of their country of origin. To mitigate potential selection bias, we use European data containing records from 30 countries, including over 90 countries of...

In this paper we present a theoretical framework for the analysis of the economic relevance of adaptation as an "happiness engine" in bad health conditions. Positing that for a given individual the level of health is quite separate from the degree of adaptation and its effect on happiness, we...

The public health literature focusing on the detrimental effects of social isolation has shown that the quantity of social connections is positively correlated with individual health. Drawing on pooled cross-sectional data, we test this hypothesis on a representative sample of the Italian...

Productivity research is Canada has traditionally focused on narrow economic issues. In our view, it has given inadequate attention to the broader ramifications of productivity, both in terms of shedding light on the importance of productivity for the advancement of various aspects of social...

We study the association between the ritual of menstrual restrictions and maternal health- care access as well as women's subjective well-being. Similar restrictions, also practised around the time of childbirth, are based on the assumption that women are ritually impure during these phases of...

We estimate the direct causal effect of loneliness on a variety of health outcomes using a sample of second-generation immigrants among older adults drawn from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe. In an effort to account for the endogeneity of self-declared loneliness, we...