Suchergebnisse

UK households have been exposed to economic recession followed by a government programme of austerity, putting many under severe financial strain. Using UK longitudinal household data, we find that the feeling of not being able to cope financially matters for individual mental health and general health status even when controlling for individual heterogeneity and potential reverse causation. We develop a theoretical model which brings some of the rigour of lifetime economic decision-making models to bear on our understanding of the causes of financial strain. Our estimation results for this model highlight that shocks to how we view our financial situation are more important for subjective financial well-being than not having enough income or being liquidity constrained. Recent welfare and pension reforms intended to reduce budget deficits may have exacerbated financial strain and thus increased public healthcare costs. In the case of disability benefits reform, we find that the uncertainty generated by an opaque process of reassessment caused financial strain to increase even when households were not materially worse off.

The literature on the long-run effects of war has largely neglected the labour market implications of permanent illness or injury from conflict among the civilian population. From 1969 to 1998, Northern Ireland experienced a violent ethnopolitical conflict characterised by terrorist bombing campaigns, sectarian killings and armed forces patrolling the streets. The consequences of this period for current high work disability rates are disputed by the main political parties. We address this question using a new high-quality dataset. Potential endogeneity and reverse causation issues are addressed using the intensity of conflict-related deaths as instruments. We find clear evidence that conflict has increased work disability by 9.0 percentage points. The only doctor-diagnosed medical condition mediating this effect is mental ill-health. It is timely to consider the likely enduring economic consequences of a return to violence in the context of the potentially destabilising effects of Brexit.

We analyse data collected from a survey of Northern Irish low-income households experiencing varying degrees of financial hardship and examine how debt affects health and health-related behaviours. Our results indicate that the subjective experience of feeling financially stressed has a robust relationship with most aspects of health, including ability to self-care, problems performing usual activities, pain problems and psychological health. In contrast, the size of the debt, the type of debt or the number of different lenders does not add any extra explanatory power. Additionally, our results indicate that the pathway from financial difficulties to worse health runs through worse diets and increased consumption of cigarettes and drugs. This research is timely as household debt burdens will soon surpass the high levels seen at the time of the financial crisis and the introduction of welfare reform in Northern Ireland will put additional strain on low-income households.

AbstractThe use of personal finance smartphone apps results in an improvement in various measures used to assess financial knowledge and skills, attitudes and motivations, and financially capable behaviors for those in low‐income households. Those provided with smartphone apps demonstrated increased self‐confidence in financial decision‐making and financial literacy and improved their ability to delay self‐gratification and their sense of being able to effect change. Financially capable behavior changes manifested in being better able to keep track of finances and manage unexpected bills. User engagement with finance apps could be improved by targeting users with a specific financial decision‐making problem, personalizing the apps through push notifications to encourage ongoing user engagement, and incorporating game mechanics.

Accessing elderly housing wealth through equity release mortgages (ERMs) continue to be the focus of policy debates about how to pay for social care and how to support retirement incomes in the UK. We demonstrate in this paper that the spatial concentration of this market in just a few regions is not due to demand but to the risks faced by suppliers. We show that by ignoring regional variations in No Negative Equity Guarantee risk in national pricing models providers cannot profitably supply these products outside areas of high house price growth. We also show that EU Solvency II capital requirements provide a further disincentive to supply ERMs in these areas. Government subsidies to product provision are also modelled and shown to be infeasibly high. We therefore conclude that the government policy focus on equity release as a means of tackling the challenges of an ageing population is misplaced.

This study examines whether labour outcomes of HIV-infected workers treated with antiretrovirals depend on the stage of the disease when commencing therapy. We use data on employment separation and absenteeism from the workplace health programme of South Africa's largest coal mining company over the period January 2009 to March 2017 in a Cox proportional hazards model.When treatment was initiated at a CD4+ T cell count above 350 cells/μl, the risk of separating from the company was 36 per cent lower and the risk of absence was 21 per cent lower than initiating at a CD4 count below 200 cells/μl and these differences persist over time. Also, we find that ART initiation at CD4>=350 results in a 11 per cent lower risk of absence prior to treatment.While many companies and the South African government have adopted universal test-and-treat policies aiming to initiate all HIV-infected people as early as possible, most HIV patients still start treatment late in the disease course when their CD4 counts have fallen to low levels. Our results indicate early HIV detection and treatment could have large productivity gains.

AbstractStiglitz's Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (CMEPSP) argued that well‐being is multidimensional and identified eight distinct dimensions. Conventional linear techniques confirm that a large number of dimensions are needed to describe development. In contrast, a new non‐linear technique that we introduce from chaos theory shows that a smaller number of dimensions are needed to span the development space. From the analysis, variables representing the Health, Education, Inequality and Individual Rights areas of life quality would provide a broad picture of development, whereas income per capita adds little extra information. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In his last two State of the Union addresses, President Barack Obama has focused on the need to deliver innovative solutions to improve human health, through the Precision Medicine Initiative in 2015 and the recently announced Cancer Moonshot in 2016. Precision cancer care has delivered clear patient benefit, but even for high-impact medicines such as imatinib mesylate (Glivec) in chronic myeloid leukaemia, the excitement at the success of this practice-changing clinical intervention has been somewhat tempered by the escalating price of this 'poster child' for precision cancer medicine (PCM). Recent studies on the costs of cancer drugs have revealed significant price differentials, which are a major causative factor behind disparities in the access to new generations of immunological and molecularly targeted agents. In this perspective, we will discuss the benefits of PCM to modern cancer control, but also emphasise how increasing costs are rendering the current approaches to integrating the paradigm of PCM unsustainable. Despite the ever increasing pressure on cancer and health care budgets, innovation will and must continue. Value-based frameworks offer one of the most rational approaches for policymakers committed to improving cancer outcomes through a public health approach.