Educational inequalities in deaths of despair in 14 OECD countries: a cross-sectional observational study.

Background: Deaths of despair are a key contributor to stagnating life expectancy in the USA, especially among those without a university-level education, but these findings have not been compared internationally.

Methods: Mortality and person-year population exposure data were collected in 14 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development member countries and stratified by age, sex, educational attainment and cause of death. The sample included 1.

Changes in longevity inequality by education among OECD countries before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background: Disparities in life expectancy between socioeconomic groups are one of the main challenges for health policy, and their reduction over time is an important policy objective.

Methods: Observational study using routinely registered data on mortality around 2011 and 2016 by sex, age, educational attainment level, and cause of death in 13 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The main outcome measures are life expectancy by education at the ages of 25 and 65 in 2011 and 2016.

The politicized pandemic: Ideological polarization and the behavioral response to COVID-19.

In a representative sample of the U.S. population during the first summer of the COVID-19 pandemic, we investigate how prosociality and ideology interact in their relationship with health-protecting behavior and trust in the government to handle the crisis.

The impact of decentralisation on the performance of health care systems: a non-linear relationship.

This paper examines the role of institutions-notably the degree of administrative decentralisation across levels of government-in health care decision-making and health spending as well as life expectancy. The empirical analysis builds on a new methodology to analyse health sector performance. In particular, the present analysis examines the impact of centralisation versus decentralisation of responsibilities across levels of government, making use of newly collected data on governance and expenditure assignment, as well as non-linear empirical specifications.

Correction: Well-being through the lens of the internet.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.

Well-being through the lens of the internet.

We build models to estimate well-being in the United States based on changes in the volume of internet searches for different words, obtained from the Google Trends website. The estimated well-being series are weighted combinations of word groups that are endogenously identified to fit the weekly subjective well-being measures collected by Gallup Analytics for the United States or the biannual measures for the 50 states. Our approach combines theoretical underpinnings and statistical analysis, and the model we construct successfully estimates the out-of-sample evolution of most subjective well-being measures at a one-year horizon.

The Role of Policy and Institutions on Health Spending.

This paper investigates the impact of policies and institutions on health expenditures for a large panel of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries for the period of 2000-2010. A set of 20 policy and institutional indicators developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development are integrated into a theoretically motivated econometric framework, alongside control variables related to demographic (dependency ratio) and non-demographic (income, prices and technology) drivers of health expenditures per capita. Although a large share of cross-country differences in public health expenditures can be explained by demographic and economic factors (around 71%), cross-country variations in policies and institutions also have a significant influence, explaining most of the remaining difference in public health spending (23%).