Health and the Evolution of Welfare across Brazilian Municipalities This paper describes the pattern of reductions in mortality across Brazilian municipalities between 1970 and 2000, and analyzes its causes and consequences. It shows that, as in the international context, the relationship between income and life expectancy has shifted consistently in the recent past. But reductions in mortality...

While undernutrition among children is very pervasive both in SubSaharan Africa and South Asia, child mortality is rather low in South Asia. In contrast to that Sub-Saharan African countries suffer by far the worst from high rates of child mortality. This different pattern of child mortality and undernutrition in both regions is well known, but approaches using aggregated macro data have not be...

The Effects on Stature of Poverty, Family Size and Birth Order: British Children in the 1930s This paper examines effects of socio-economic conditions on the standardised heights and body mass index of children in Interwar Britain. It uses the Boyd Orr cohort, a survey of predominantly poor families taken in 1937-9, which provides a unique opportunity to explore the determinants of child health...

The rapid expansion in access to antiretroviral (ARV) drugs in sub-Saharan Africa from under 10,000 in 2000 to more than 8 million in 2011 has been enormous. Anticipating the impact of this expansion and future policy options requires identification of the impacts of access on individual behaviors that determine the course of the epidemic. This paper combines geocoded information about the timi...

Critical Periods During Childhood and Adolescence: A Study of Adult Height Among Immigrant Siblings We identify the ages that constitute critical periods in children’s development towards their adult health status. For this we use data on families migrating into Sweden from countries that are mostly poorer, with less healthy conditions. Long-run health is proxied by adult height. The relation b...

The Geographic Accessibility of Child Care Subsidies and Evidence on the Impact of Subsidy Receipt on Childhood Obesity This paper examines the impact of the spatial accessibility of public human services agencies on the likelihood of receiving a child care subsidy among disadvantaged mothers with young children. In particular, we collect data on the location of virtually every human services a...

In this explorative study we examine factors explaining individual choice of lifestyle. The empirical analysis of smoking, exercising and diet show that the mechanisms determining people’s lifestyle are complex. We argue that the economic models on the demand for health is a meaningful framework for analysing this issue, but that it needs some refinements. A suggestion for further analytical wo...

A longstanding literature has highlighted the tension between the altruism of physicians and their desire for profit. This paper develops new implications for how these competing forces drive pricing and utilization in healthcare markets. Altruism dictates that providers reduce utilization in response to higher prices, but profit-maximization does the opposite. Rational physicians will behave m...

This paper investigates the short-term eff ects of public smoking bans on individual smoking behavior. In 2007 and 2008, state-level smoking bans were gradually introduced in all of Germany’s sixteen federal states. We exploit this variation in the timing of state bans to identify the eff ect that smoke-free policies had on individuals’ smoking propensity and smoking intensity. Using rich longi...

The public health literature focusing on the detrimental effects of social isolation has shown that the quantity of social connections is positively correlated with individual health. Drawing on pooled cross-sectional data, we test this hypothesis on a representative sample of the Italian population. Our findings show that, besides the quantity of interactions, it is their quality – as measured...