Health Inequalities Research Programme, University of Otago, Wellington, PO Box 7343, Wellington, New Zealand Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Harvard School of Public Health, 677 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, USA Health Section, United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 3 UN Plaza, New York, NY 10022, USA Centre for Health Equity Studies, Stockholm University/Karolinska Inst...

Socio-economic related properties of a city grow faster than a linear relationship with the population, in a log-log plot, the so-called superlinear scaling. Conversely, the larger a city, the more efficient it is in the use of its infrastructure, leading to a sublinear scaling on these variables. In this work, we addressed a simple explanation for those scaling laws in cities based on the inte...

Poverty is a common experience for children growing up in the United States. Although only about one in five children are in poverty each year, roughly one in three will spend at least one year living in a poor household. Child poverty is a significant concern to researchers and policymakers because early childhood poverty is linked to a multitude of worse outcomes, including reduced academic a...

Malnutrition remains one of the major obstacles to human well-being and economic prosperity in developing countries. There are strong normative and instrumental reasons related to human and economic development to address the burden of malnutrition as an issue of public concern. This calls for governments to prioritize policies and actions and allocate substantial investments in efforts to addr...

Many development policies and programmes are premised on a traditional economic model of rationality to predict how individuals will respond to changes in incentives. Despite the emphasis of these programmes on poverty reduction, economists and the development community in general are still unable to fully understand how the poor make decisions, especially under uncertainty and over time. Indiv...

In this paper we use the common perspective provided by the neoclassical growth model to evaluate the size of the distortions associated with different monetary and fiscal policies designed to finance a given sequence of government expenditures. We calibrate a neoclassical monetary economy to match important features of the U.S. economy and use it to provide a quantitative assessment of the wel...

Pierre-Gerlier Forest has put forward the case that we are on the brink of a revolution in health policy that will be the result of the interplay of five factors. I would not challenge any of them but would emphasize the need to address socio-economic health inequalities, which have the potential to become a major cost driver in a time of growing economic inequality. To Dr. Forest's list, I wou...

In this paper we present an endogenous growth model with productive government spending and pollution. As to pollution we suppose that it is a by-product of aggregate production and that it negatively affects utility of the household but not production possibilities directly. Analyzing our model it is first shown that for reasonable parameter values there exists a unique balanced growth path wh...

The principal objective of our research is to examine whether the earned income tax credit (EITC), a broad-based income support program that has been shown to increase employment and income among poor working families, also improves their health and access to care. A finding that the EITC has a positive impact on the health of the American public may help guide deliberations about its future at...

BACKGROUND The objective of this study is to outline a capabilities approach to the social determinants of population health and to compare its explanatory power and implications for public policy-making with psychosocial approaches. METHODS A model linking the structures of economic and social relations to health outcomes is developed and logistic methods used to confirm its base validity fo...