BACKGROUND The persistent circulation of measles in both low-income and high-income countries requires a better characterisation of present epidemiological trends and existing immunity gaps across different sociodemographic settings. Serological surveys, which provide direct measures of population protection against the infection, are underexploited and often supply fragmentary estimates of pop...

How does a household's economic situation vary with the number of children in it? The most recent papers in the cross-national literature on the effects of children on the economic status of households have had either of two preoccupations. One is child poverty, the topic of a recent major conference (Koen Vleminckx and Timothy Smeeding, 2001). The other concerns the impact of children on the e...

Background: The transtheoretical model (TTM) is used as a framework to implement smoking cessation programs. This model has some subscales based on which the smoking temptation scale is proposed as stages movement factor. This study aimed to translate and validate the temptation subscales of the TTM questionnaire in the Iranian population. Methods...

Optimality conditions and comparative static properties of the optimal Mirrleesian nonlinear income tax are obtained for a nite population and quasilinear-in-consumption preferences. Contrary to Weymark (1987) who considers quasilinear-in-leisure preferences, the linearity with respect to gross income, which is observed by the government and used as a tax base, is lost. A reduced-form optimal i...

This paper considers the effects of changes in the income distribution in an economy where agents’ utility depends both on consumption and on their rank in the distribution of consumption of a positional good. We introduce a new methodology to compare the behavior of agents that occupy the same rank in the two different income distributions but typically have different levels of incomes, and an...

Internation comparisons of average national incomes omit important information about leisure, home production, health, etc. They are also bedevilled by index number problems. This paper suggests ways of combining working hours and life-expectancy with income comparisons, and shows that the fixed-price indexes of real income, such as those in the Penn World Table, substantially understate the in...

Doctors are involved in voluntary service more commonly than both the community and our professional colleagues realise. Traditionally, doctors are seen as busy healers who never stop looking after the sick and/or making a fortune from their daily activities. On the other hand, many in society think doctors are typically earning such high incomes that they can readily afford to volunteer their ...