Public health technologies; public goods and public health; policies toward health and safety at work; health education; financing public health; public health and public behavior; interplay between public health and health care services; inter- play between public health and other sectors; economics of public health policy.
An introduction to the work of Edgar Sydenstricker, a forgotten health economist who researched the 1918-20 influenza pandemic, the Great Depression, and inequalities in the impact of diseases such as pellagra.
Today marks World Tuberculosis (TB) Day – a celebration of the anniversary of Robert Koch’s announcement that he had discovered the Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) bacteria, which causes the disease. Today, 139 years after this announcement and in the context of… Read More »World TB Day 2021: the latest economics research
The COVID-19 pandemic has seen intense focus on the trade-offs between public health measures and the economic consequences of those measures. Policymakers, those who advise them, as well as the media at large, have repeatedly returned to the question with… Read More »Is there a role for economic evaluation in a pandemic?
On the third Thursday of every month, we speak to a recent graduate about their thesis and their studies. This month’s guest is Dr Ekaterina Bordea who has a PhD from City, University of London. If you would like to… Read More »Thesis Thursday: Ekaterina Bordea
I don’t do back of the envelope calculations, largely because the harm of a bad estimate can be worse than the harm of no estimate. A rough guess will be biased in ways we cannot possibly predict. This is acutely… Read More »Flattening the curve on the back of an envelope
Vaccine skepticism and hesitancy – the distrust and skepticism that some members of the public feel for vaccines, as well as for institutions that deliver and encourage vaccination – has emerged as a major threat to world health. Vaccine skepticism… Read More »Education versus anti-vaxxers: evidence from Europe
The agent relationship and information asymmetry are two features of healthcare economics – but how do they apply to public health policy around processed foods? Why is health different to other goods? Arrow’s 1963 seminal paper helped lay the foundations… Read More »Agent relationships and information asymmetries in public health
In the early years of the coalition government, David Cameron lauded the measurement of happiness and well-being as an indicator of national performance. Data on life satisfaction have been collected and published by the Office for National Statistics every year since… Read More »Well-being and gross national happiness for policy
Slums are a large and growing feature of urban areas in low and middle income countries. But, despite the ease with which you might picture what such informal settlements look like, there is no consensus about what exactly defines a… Read More »The health of people who live in slums and the trouble with estimating neighbourhood effects
Enrico Fermi was a physicist well known for his ability to make good approximations to difficult questions. A well-known Fermi problem is ‘how many piano tuners are there in Chicago?’ Answering these sorts of questions involves using estimates of simpler quantities that,… Read More »Fermi problems and public health