Recent and planned policy changes in the NHS, including the abolition of the Medical Practices Committee, revised tendering arrangements for new practices, readily available information on practices via NHS Choices, and letting patients register with any practice, will increase potential...

SUMMARY We examine the effect of survey measurement error on the empirical relationship between child mental health and personal and family characteristics, and between child mental health and educational progress. Our contribution is to use unique UK survey data that contain (potentially...

type="main" xml:id="rssa12038-abs-0001" <title type="main">Summary</title> <p>We undertake a detailed statistical investigation of the sensitivity of estimates of the prevalence of childhood mental health problems to the provider of the health assessment, with particular focus on the implications for the estimates of the...</p>

type="main" xml:id="rssa12074-abs-0001" <title type="main">Summary</title> <p>The paper explores the relationship between family income and a range of cognitive, socioemotional and health outcomes in mid-childhood. Child developmental outcomes are conceptualized as the result of an underlying set of associations or pathways...</p>

The impacts of choice in public services are controversial. We exploit a reform in the English National Health Service to assess the impact of relaxing constraints on patient choice. We estimate a demand model to evaluate whether increased choice increased demand elasticity faced by hospitals...

The literature that examines the relationship between child or adolescent Body Mass Index (BMI) and academic attainment generally finds mixed results. This may be due to the use of different data sets, conditioning variables, or methodologies: studies either use an individual fixed effects (FE)...

This paper addresses a lack of evidence on the impact of performance pay in the public sector by evaluating a pilot scheme of incentives in a major government agency. The incentive scheme was based on teams and covered quantity and quality targets, measured with varying degrees of precision. We...

Height has long been recognized as being associated with better outcomes: the question is whether this association is causal. We use children's genetic variants as instrumental variables to deal with possible unobserved confounders and examine the effect of child/adolescent height on a wide...