The Conscientious Fraternity

Commentary: Liberty, fraternity, equality.

relationship between income inequality and health has been independently discovered several times by people who appeared not to know of each other's work. 1,2 When I first published on the subject 3 I too was unaware of Rodgers' paper 4 until George Davey Smith pointed it out to me. Rodgers introduced an income distribution term into his regressions simply to take account of the well-known curv...

Fraternity membership and binge drinking.

This paper examines the relationship that social fraternity and sorority membership has with binge drinking incidence and frequency among 18-24 year old full-time 4-year college students who participated in the 1995 National College Health Risk Behavior Survey. To net out unobserved heterogeneity, several measures of situational and total alcohol use are entered into the regressions as explanat...

Conscientious objections to reform.

Conscientious Objection to Vaccination

Vaccine refusal occurs for a variety of reasons. In this article we examine vaccine refusals that are made on conscientious grounds; that is, for religious, moral, or philosophical reasons. We focus on two questions: first, whether people should be entitled to conscientiously object to vaccination against contagious diseases (either for themselves or for their children); second, if so, to what ...

Does Equality Lead to Fraternity

Several cross-country studies have observed a negative correlation between inequality and interpersonal trust. Using data from 59 countries, I instrument for inequality using the relative size of the mature-aged cohort, and find that a rise in inequality reduces trust. JEL Classification: D3, D7