Introduction

This book provides a practical guide to applied health economics. It is built around a series of case studies that are based on recent research. The first, which runs through the book, explores the dynamics of self-reported health in the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). The aim is to investigate socioeconomic gradients in health, persistence of health problems and the difficulties created by sample attrition in panel data (Contoyannnis, Jones and Rice 2004; Jones, Koolman and Rice 2006). The data for this and all the other case studies are introduced in Chapter 1, which also introduces some general principles of survey design. Chapter 2 uses the BHPS sample to show how descriptive techniques, including graphs and tables, can be used to summarize and explore the raw data and provide an intuitive understanding of how variables are distributed and associated with each other.