This paper addresses questions of the following nature: under what conditions does a welfare-improving reform of the existing piecewise linear income tax schedule necessitate a change in a particular agent type's marginal tax rate? Our analysis therefore addresses the sorts of questions...

Fiscal consolidation programmes have been adopted almost uni-versally in the developed world since 2011 in an effort to reverse the substantially worsened fiscal outlook in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Prolonged stagnation combined with increasing debt levels over this period...

We examine the vertical transmission of overweight drawing upon a sample of English children, both adopted and non-adopted, and their families. Our results suggest strong evidence of an intergenerational association of overweight among adoptees, indicating transmission through cultural factors....

Processes of transition to democracy and country break up stand out as ideal experiments to estimate the impact of wide institutional reform on well-being. Changes in population heights are regarded as virtuous pointers of well-being improvements in psycho-social environments, which improve with...

Applying Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to real-world public policy issues can raise many interesting complications beyond those considered in standard models of DEA. One of these complications arises if the funding levels of public service providers, and their ability to attract and retain...

This article analyses the role played by childhood circumstances, especially social and family background in explaining health status among older adults. We also explore the hypothesis of an intergenerational transmission of health inequalities using the French part of SHARE. As the impact of...

The general aim of this paper is to review how matching methods try to solve the evaluation problem – with a particular focus on propensity score matching – and their usefulness for the particular case of health programme evaluation. The “classical” case of matching estimation with a...

This paper uses data from the National Child Development Study to propose an empirical implementation of the concept of inequality of opportunity in health. Drawing on the distinction between circumstance and effort variables in John Roemer's work on equality of opportunity, circumstances are...

This paper uses the British Health and Lifestyle Survey (1984-1985) data and the longitudinal follow-up of May 2003 to investigate the de- terminants of premature mortality risk in Great Britain and the con- tribution of lifestyle choices to socio-economic inequality in health. A behavioural...

This paper examines whether cost sharing for prescription drugs improves medication-related quality measured by the probability of inappropriate prescription drug use among US seniors. Using data from 1996 to 2005, we explore various specifications that correct for sample selection,...