Recently, early investments in the human capital of children from socially disadvantaged environments have attracted a great deal of attention. Programs of such early intervention, aiming at children's health and well-being, are spreading considerably in the U.S. and are currently tested in...

We propose a method of measuring and decomposing inequity in health care utilization that allows for heterogeneity in the use-need relationship. This makes explicit inequity that derives from unequal treatment response to variation in need, as well as that due to differential effects of non-need...

This paper presents a model of human recognition, a concept defined as the acknowledgement provided to an individual that he is of inherent value with intrinsic qualities in common with the recognizer. The model describes provision and receipt of human recognition, its contribution to utility,...

A health care system is efficient when an increase in spending results in significant improvements in the health of a population. We test the relative efficiency of public and private health care spending in reducing infant and child mortality using cross-national data for 163 countries. There...

This paper analyzes the effect of educational mismatch on wages in Germany, using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. Educational mismatch has been discussed extensively, mostly by applying OLS wage regressions which are prone to an unobserved heterogeneity bias. This problem is...

Risk classification refers to the use of observable characteristics by insurers to group individuals with similar expected claims, compute the corresponding premiums, and thereby reduce asymmetric information. With perfect risk classification, premiums fully reflect the expected cost associated...

This article identifies information asymmetries and the corresponding problem of overtreatment as a possible source of prevention and health disparities when patients differ with respect to their health risk. It analyzes preventive health behavior (primary prevention) and preventive health-care...

Few economic indicators have more salience and pervasive financial impact on everyday lives in the United States than poverty measures. Nevertheless, policymakers, researchers, advocates, and legislators generally do not understand the details of poverty measure mechanics. These detailed...

Does income inequality increase or decrease in a society whose individual members experience longer lifespans (e.g. due to exogenous advances in medical research)? Longer life duration increases income inequality when income shocks are perfectly correlated across time periods (e.g., workers are...

We investigate whether primary care physician and patient concordance in terms of socio-economic status (SES) reduces the SES inequality in health. We measure physicians' SES by their childhood SES and find that SES concordance decreases low-SES patients' mortality, while high-SES patients'...