Despite current emphasis on health insurance expansions in developing countries, inefficient consumer incentives for over-use of medical care are an important counterbalancing concern.
The period from 2003 to the summer of 2008 saw significant and sustained increases in global food prices, especially for staple goods such as maize, rice and wheat.
This book documents the first five years of life of the children of the influential Millennium Cohort Study, which is tracking almost 19,000 babies born in 2000 and 2001 in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
This paper seeks to fill this gap by providing an in-depth examination of data from one company, Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS), recording grocery purchases over five years. We assess how far the ongoing demands of participation lead to 'fatigue' in respondents' recording of their spending and the implications for household attrition, and we provide a detailed comparison of the expenditure data collected by TNS and the well-established Expenditure and Food Survey (EFS). Broadly, we suggest that problems of fatigue and attrition may not be particularly severe, though there are differences in expenditures that cannot be attributed to demographic or time effects and may be suggestive of survey mode effects.
Data from market research firms are increasingly being used by social science researchers. These data provide potentially useful information, including detailed nutritional information and well-measured prices, and their panel structure is appealing as it permits researchers to control for unobservable time-invariant household characteristics and to model dynamic aspects of household behaviour.
Starting with a look at historical funding for the NHS, The King's Fund and the Institute for Fiscal Studies set out three plausible future funding scenarios and their consequences.
This paper documents the potential and actual savings that consumers realize from four particular types of purchasing behavior: purchasing on sale; buying in bulk (at a lower per unit price); buying generic brands; and choosing outlets.
