The measurement of health disparities is a key component for the assessment of health systems. One aspect of these disparities – which hitherto has received limited attention – is the risk people face about their future health. This paper integrates risk into the standard inequality...

This paper discusses measurement of socioeconomic inequalities in prevalence of a health condition. As its point of departure, it uses the recent exchange between Guido Erreygers and Adam Wagstaff in this journal, where they discuss merits of their own corrections of the frequently used...

Self-reported data on utilization of health care is a key input into a range of studies. However, the length of the recall period in self-reported health care questions varies between surveys and this variation may affect the results of the studies. While longer recall periods include more...

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...

Decomposition of a bivariate rank dependent index, such as the concentration index, is commonly used to explain socioeconomic inequalities in health. We introduce a new decomposition technique based on the recentered influence function that yields the marginal effects of covariates on the...

Policies aimed to spur quality competition among health care providers are ubiquitous, but their impact on quality is ex ante ambiguous. This study contributes to the sparse empirical literature on primary care quality by examining the heterogeneous impact of recent competition enhancing reforms...

Consumer choice of services that are financed by a third party may improve the matching of consumers and providers, and spur competition over quality dimensions relevant to consumers. However, in markets characterized by information frictions and switching costs, the gains from choice may fail...

There is a well-documented large positive correlation between education and health and yet it remains unclear as to whether this is a causal relationship. Potential reasons for this lack of clarity include estimation using different methods, analysis of different populations and school reforms...