Health economics, statistics, and health services research at the University of Warwick. Also like rock climbing and making noise on the guitar.
There is a large literature documenting the socioeconomic gradient in health. Whether it be measured by education, income or some other metric, individuals of a lower socioeconomic status have worse health. Understanding and explaining this gradient is of great importance… Read More »Marginalism, reductionism, realism
Economists need data. In this post I want to introduce those of you who don’t know it to a magnificent data source – quandl.com. Quandl is an open source website that indexes a huge range of data – over 6,000,000… Read More »Data everywhere! – Introduction to Quandl
An argument that often comes up when it comes to the distribution of scarce health resources is who should receive them. Many different arguments are posed with varying degrees of sophistication. Various studies have elicited population preferences for distributing scarce… Read More »To whom the benefits?
In a previous post I considered whether the current Great Recession had been good for your health. Evidence suggests that temporary reductions in income may improve your health for a number of reasons. In part, when I lose my job… Read More »Hidden costs of the recession
There have been a good number of articles to document the phenomenon of a counter-cyclical relationship between unemployment and health. As unemployment rises, deaths from a number of causes have been found to decline. These include accidents, infant mortality, heart… Read More »Is this recession good for your health?
The current UK government is toying with the idea of introducing a minimum price for alcohol in England and Wales of around 45p per unit. However, just this week it was revealed that some senior cabinet members opposed the policy; putting… Read More »A minimum price for alcohol
Last year William Baumol published a book entitled The Cost Disease in which he discussed his theory for why healthcare costs continue to rise as a proportion of GDP, while at the same time manufactured goods get cheaper. This idea… Read More »Diagnosing the cost disease
Drugs – Without the Hot Air: Minimising the Harms of Legal and Illegal Drugs Paperback, 368 pages, ISBN: 9781906860165, published 31 May 2012 Amazon / Google Books / UIT Cambridge In 2009, Professor David Nutt was rather unceremoniously asked by the… Read More »Review: Drugs – Without the Hot Air (David Nutt)
In 1976, Robert Lucas wrote a paper that articulated a common criticism of macroeconomic policy-making based on historical data. The essence of the critique was that, since the parameters of macroeconometric models were not structural, they were liable to change… Read More »The Lucas critique and hospital quality
Shortly after reading William Baumol’s new book ‘The Cost Disease: Why Computers Get Cheaper and Health Care Doesn’t‘, I thought that its subject matter – rising healthcare costs – may make a good subject for a post. However, John Appleby… Read More »The cost disease