The health status of people is a precious commodity and central to economic, socio-political, and environmental dimensions of any country. Yet it is often the missing statistic in all general statistics, demographics, and presentations about the portrait of immigrants and natives. In this paper...

Standard theories of resource allocation within the household posit that parents' investments in their children reflect a combination of children's endowments and parents' preferences for child quality. We study how changes in children's cognitive endowments affect the distribution of parental...

People in Canada and the U.S. often make claims regarding whose country has a better health system. Several researchers have attempted to address this question by analysing subjective health in the two countries, thus assuming a common definition of “good” health. Using data from the Joint...

There are fundamental public health challenges and trade–offs that need to be confronted for the achievement of the highest attainable standard of health and the sustainability agendas to be compatible. The trade–offs arise because, at a population level, the highest attainable standard of...

Background: In 2005, India launched the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) to strengthen the primary healthcare system. NRHM also aims to encourage pregnant women, particularly of low socioeconomic backgrounds, to use institutional maternal healthcare. We evaluated the impacts of NRHM on...

We evaluate the short- and medium-term health impacts of Sure Start, a large-scale and universal early childhood program in England. We exploit the rollout of the program and implement a difference-in-difference approach, combining data on the exact location and opening date of Sure Start...

The 21st century has been a period of rising inequality in both income and health. In this study, we find that geographic inequality in mortality for midlife Americans increased by about 70 percent from 1992 to 2016. This was not simply because states such as New York or California benefited...

This paper evaluates the short- and medium-term health impacts of offering families with children under 5 universal access to centres providing childcare, health services, parenting support and parental job assistance. Increased access to these centres during early childhood increases the...

Recent theories on fiscal decentralization support the view that sub-national governments who finance a larger share of their spending with taxes raised locally by themselves are more accountable towards their citizens. Whilst evidence on improvements in spending efficiency is relatively common,...