In this note, I address the trade-off between children’s health and parental preference toward similarity with children. In my model, better-off individuals mate genetically close partners and then use wealth to treat their children’s health problems, caused by inbreeding depression. As a...

Evidence for the short-term impact of early intervention on childhood health is weak and inconsistent. Using rigorous methods, careful hypothesis setting, and socioeconomic contextualisation, we examine the impact of an Irish home visiting programme on child health. The treatment provides...

Health literature shows that unemployment has a gendered effect on health. However, whether men or women are more affected and why remains unclear. We assume that unemployment harms women less than men because of two mechanisms: social roles theories and health selection. First, the availability...

We investigate the effects of the introduction of a population-wide Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination program on the vaccine take-up of the targeted group of 15-year-old girls and their older sisters. For identification, we rely on a regression discontinuity design and high-quality Danish...

Does living in a low-income neighborhood have negative health consequences? We document causal neighborhood effects on health by exploiting a Spatial Dispersal Policy that quasi-randomly resettled refugees across neighborhoods from 1986-1998. The risk of developing a lifestyle related disease...

This study uses Swedish data to analyze why the SES-health gradient increases with ageing. Since different measures of SES and health capture different aspects, we use this information to explore the age increase in health inequality and to discriminate between three types of explanations,...

This study uses the Swedish register of prescribed drugs, merged with the Survey of Living Conditions (the ULF), to analyze the socioeconomic gradient in drug utilization. It finds a significant education gradient (but no income gradient) in individual drug utilization. Whereas the education...

The concentration index and decomposition analysis are commonly used in economics to measure and explain socioeconomic inequalities in health. Such analysis builds on the strong assumption that a health production function can be estimated without substantial bias implying that health is caused...

What change in the distribution of a population's health preserves the level of inequality? The answer to this analogous question in the context of income inequality lies somewhere between a uniform and a proportional change. These polar positions represent the absolute and relative inequality...

This article suggests an extension of the standard decomposition of the concentration index that allows for an exploration of the pathways through which socioeconomic background relates to income-related health inequality. This novel approach is contrasted to the standard one using a panel of...