The paper surveys the economics literature on equity in health care financing and delivery. The focus is, for the most part, on empirical work, especially that involving international and temporal comparisons. There is, however, some discussion of the concept and definition of equity. The...

Biased longevity expectations will lead to suboptimal decisions regarding saving, retirement, annuitization and health, with consequences for wellbeing in old age. Systematic differences in the accuracy of longevity expectations may partly explain heterogeneity in economic behaviour by education...

We examine economic vulnerability to illness when, as for informal sector workers in Thailand, there is universal coverage for health care but earnings losses are uninsured. Even with comprehensive health care entitlement, severe illness that strikes an initially healthy worker is found to raise...

Rapid urbanization could have positive and negative health effects, such that the net impact on population health is not obvious. It is, however, highly pertinent to the human welfare consequences of development. This paper uses community and individual level longitudinal data from the China...

We examine the relationship between income and health with the purpose of establishing the extent to which the distribution of health in a population contributes to income inequality and is itself a product of that inequality. The evidence supports a significant and substantial impact of...

Reliance on self-rated health to proxy medical need can bias estimation of education-related inequity in health care utilisation. We correct this bias both by instrumenting self-rated health with objective health indicators and by purging self-rated health of reporting heterogeneity identified...

We present a theory of the relation between health and retirement that generates testable predictions regarding the interaction of health, wealth and financial incentives in retirement decisions. The theory predicts (i) that wealthier individuals (compared to poorer individuals) are more likely...

It is well known that income and health are positively associated. Much less is known about the strength of this association in times of growth and recession. We develop a novel decomposition method that focuses on isolating the roles played by government transfers versus market transfers on...

This paper offers an approach to assessing quality-of-life, based on Sen's (1985) theory, which it uses to understand loss in quality-of-life due to mobility-impairment. Specifically, it provides a theoretical analysis which is able to account for the possibility that some functionings may...

Reliance on self-rated health to proxy medical need can bias estimation of education-related inequity in health care utilisation. We correct this bias both by instrumenting self-rated health with objective health indicators and by purging self-rated health of reporting heterogeneity identified...