Young people with little "social or health capital" may be more likely to take up hazardous consumption and shun investments in human capital, raising their likelihood of a "rags to rags" sequence. First, diminishing marginal utility could raise the marginal benefit of hazardous consumption and...

There are well-established frameworks for comparing the performance of health systems cross-nationally on multiple dimensions. A sub-set of such comprehensive schema is taken up by criteria specifically applied to health service delivery, including hospital performance.

Though there is much agreement on the importance of the social determinants of health, debate continues on suitable empirically-based models to underpin efforts to tackle health and health care disparities. We demonstrate an approach that uses a dynamic micro-simulation model of the early life...