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...

Regarding the connection between economic development and public health, the statistically evident correlation between a country's gross domestic product and life expectancy is widely discussed. An important aspect that keeps resurfacing in discussions on why the relationship between the latter...

We show that children who are born at or just before the weekend are less likely to be breastfed, owing to poorer breastfeeding support services in hospitals at weekends. We use this variation to estimate the effect of breastfeeding on children’s development in the first five years of life,...

Early life shocks result in physiological changes that allow infants and children to adapt to surrounding environments. We examine the implications of one form of biological adaptation - immune system learning - for human capital formation. Using two case studies, where interventions to reduce...

We develop an empirical approach to analyse, measure and decompose Inequality of Opportunity (IOp) in health, based on a latent class model. This addresses some of the limitations that affect earlier work in this literature concerning the definition of types, such as partial observability, the...

During the Covid 19 Pandemic, there have been countless calls for the creation of ''global public goods'' or ''global commons'' issued by a variety of actors with sometimes diametrically opposed views, as if the two notions had the same meaning. And indeed, even today these notions are still...

We study the regional distribution of primary care physicians in Germany to learn about the extent and possible reasons of geographic maldistribution. For this aim, we apply a greedy capacitated algorithm on very fine spatial data. We compare this reference allocation of primary care physicians...

This paper examines weight loss and the formation of healthy habits through cash rewards in the context of a multi-phase randomized controlled trial involving 700 obese individuals. We find effects of monetary incentives for weight loss of up to EUR 300 on body weight during all experimental...

This paper examines weight loss and the formation of healthy habits through cash rewards in the context of a multi-phase randomized controlled trial involving 700 obese individuals. We find effects of monetary incentives for weight loss of up to EUR 300 on body weight during all experimental...