Wide cross-country variation in obesity rates have been reported within European Union member states. However, health production determinants for these differences have been largely overlooked in the health economics literature. In this paper we propose a methodology for conducting standardized...

Measuring the performance of health systems has become a key tool in aiding decision makers to describe, analyze, compare and ultimately improve the delivery and outcomes achieved by a system. The World Health Organization’s (WHO) framework for assessing performance includes three intrinsic...

We consider the effects of contractual and working conditions on self-assessed health and psychological well-being using twelve waves (1991/92 – 2002/2003) of the British Household Panel Survey. While one branch of the literature suggests that “atypical” contractual conditions have a...

International comparison of performance has become an influential lever for change in the provision of public services. For health care, patients’ views and opinions are increasingly being recognized as legitimate means for assessing the provision of services, to stimulate quality...

The World Health Report 2000 proposed three fundamental goals for health systems encompassing population health, health care finance and health systems responsiveness. Each of the goals incorporates both an efficiency and equity dimension. While inequalities in population health and health care...

This paper investigates the influence of aggregate country-level characteristics on health system responsiveness, using data on 62 countries present in the World Health Survey. While evidence exists on variations in reported levels of health system responsiveness across countries, the literature...

By using university administrative and survey data on Italian graduates, we analyse the transmission of liberal professions from fathers to children. We assess the effect of nepotism and family networking, separately from other transmission channels, on the probability of choosing a degree that...

In this paper, we consider a specification testing problem in nonlinear time series models with nonstationary regressors and propose using a nonparametric kernel-based test statistic. The nullasymptotics for the proposed nonparametric test statistic have been well developed in the existing...

Using an experimental design, we investigate the reasons behind the gendered division of housework within couples. In particular, we assess whether the fact that women do more housework may beexplained by differences in preferences deriving from differences in gender identity between men and...

This paper presents a comprehensive assessment of fiscal austerity, with special emphasis on its distributional consequences, which are surprisingly ignored in the existing literature. Using amedium scale DSGE model we find that both the aggregate and distributional consequences of fiscal...