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,...

While a growing literature examining the relationship between income and health expenditures suggests that health care is a luxury good, this conclusion is contentiously debated due to heterogeneity of the existing results. This paper tests the luxury good hypothesis (namely that income...

This paper investigates the persistence in health limitations for individuals within the member states of the European Union. We use the full 8 waves of data available in the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) to explore the relative contributions of state dependence, unobserved...

I use longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study to estimate the effect of job loss on health for near elderly employees. Job loss is a major cause of economic insecurity for working age individuals, and can cause reduction in income, and loss of health insurance. To control for...

We follow individuals as they retire using discrete-time hazard models applied to a stock sample from 12 waves of the British Household Panel Survey. Results confirm that health shocks are a determinant of retirement age and are quantitatively more important than pension entitlement. This is the...

This paper investigates the causal relationship between ill-health and retirement among older working individuals. We represent the transition to retirement as a discrete-time hazard model using a stock-sample from the first five waves (2001- 2005) of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in...

A copula is best described, as in Joe (1997), as a multivariate distribution function that is used to bind each marginal distribution function to form the joint. The copula parameterises the dependence between the margins, while the parameters of each marginal distribution function can be...