Understanding whether the gradient in children’s health becomes steeper with age is an important first step in uncovering the mechanisms that connect economic and health status, and in recommending sensible interventions to protect children’s health. To that end, this paper examines why two...

This paper examines how child maltreatment is affected by the economic circumstances of parents. “Child maltreatment” encompasses a wide range of behaviors that adversely affect children. It includes neglect, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and other forms of abuse or neglect. Using...

Poverty is again at the center of debates about development. Dominant international institutions have committed themselves to addressing poverty, notably the World Bank, through its Poverty Reduction Strategies, and the United Nations, through the Millennium Development Goals. Discussion has...

That wealthy people live longer and have lower morbidity, on average, than do poor people has been well documented across countries, within countries at a point in time, and over time with economic growth. The positive correlation between income and health is not limited to the bottom end of the...

What is inequality in health? Are economists' standard tools for measuring income inequality relevant or useful for measuring it? Does income protect health and does income inequality pose a hazard to health? In this paper, I discuss two different concepts of health inequality and relate each of...

It has long been recognized that taller adults hold jobs of higher status and, on average, earn more than other workers. A large number of hypotheses have been put forward to explain the association between height and earnings. In developed countries, researchers have emphasized factors such as...

Standard methods of poverty measurement assume that an individual is poor if he or she lives in a family whose income or consumption lies below an appropriate poverty line. Such methods can provide only limited insight into male and female poverty separately. Nevertheless, there are reasons why...

We use data from the Whitehall II Study to examine the joint evolution of health status and economic status over the life course. We study the links between health and socioeconomic status in childhood and health and employment status in middle and older ages. Because the population from which...

I find that compensation structure impacts a doctor’s decision to perform a Cesarean section (C-section). Using Medicaid reimbursement and vital statistics data, I find that fee-for-service doctors respond to an increase in the relative reimbursement for C-sections by increasing their use of...

What are the determinants of the health and of well-being? Income and wealth are clearly part of the story, but does access to health-care have a large independent effect, as the advocates of more investment in health-care, such as the World Health Organization’s Commission on Macroeconomics...