Short Course 2026 | Health Inequality Measurement, Aversion & Evaluation
Instructors: Tom Van Ourti, Owen O’Donnell & Matthew Robson
Health systems increasingly seek not only to improve population health, but also to reduce inequalities in health. Understanding how health inequality is measured, how society values its reduction, and how these considerations can be incorporated into economic evaluation has become increasingly important for researchers and decision-makers.
Join Tom Van Ourti, Owen O’Donnell and Matthew Robson for this short course on measuring health inequality, eliciting aversion to it, and applying these concepts to distributionally sensitive evaluation.
This short course reviews recent developments in the measurement of health (care) inequality, the elicitation of aversion to it and applications to distributionally sensitive evaluation of cost effectiveness and population health. Measurement covers computation, normative foundations and limitations of rank-dependent measures of health inequality. Extensions to account for measurement properties of health and alternative attitudes to inequality are explained. Health (care) inequality is distinguished from health (care) inequity, and approaches to measuring the latter outlined. Aversion to health inequality is relevant to policy design and evaluation. Evidence on it is accumulating rapidly.
The short course introduces a budget-set experiment that elicits this inequality aversion and is applicable online with representative samples. Evidence obtained on aversion to health inequality, unidimensionally and in relation to non-health characteristics, is reviewed. Derivation of health equity weights is explained and their application in evaluation demonstrated. Short course participants can do an experiment online in advance and will see the distribution of elicited health inequality aversion. Evaluations of health care interventions and population health are mostly based on averages. And yet, health inequality reduction is an objective of most health systems and public health agencies. This objective is not incorporated into standard cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) and population health monitoring. Developments of distributionally sensitive CEA and population health measurement are beginning to change this.
The short course focuses on a dominance-based approach to both extensions. This uses higher order stochastic dominance to robustly rank health distributions, with normative foundation in general ethical principles.
Join us!
Date: Wednesday, 7 October 2026
Time: 10:00–13:00 (WEST – Lisbon Time)
Format: Online
Language: English
Session structure
10:00–11:00 | Tom Van Ourti
- Theory: Dominance and Social Welfare Function (SWF).
- Practical application: Population Health Monitoring.
11:00–12:00 | Owen O’Donnell
- Theory: Parametric welfare measures derived from the SWF.
- Practical application: Distributional Cost-Effectiveness Analysis.
12:00–13:00 | Matthew Robson
- Theory: Elicitation of parameters from the SWF-derived parametric measures.
- Practical application: Elicitation in a UK sample.
About the Instructors
Tom Van Ourti
Tom Van Ourti is Professor of Applied Health Economics at Erasmus School of Economics and the Erasmus School of Health Policy & Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam, with a research focus on health and inequality. His work examines the socioeconomic health gradient, with particular interests in impact evaluation, preventive care, mental health, perinatal health, the measurement of health inequalities, and the elicitation of social preferences for income and health. He has published in journals including the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Health Economics, and the Bulletin of the World Health Organization. He teaches applied econometrics and health economics and organises a yearly PhD Summer School on inequalities in health and healthcare. He obtained his PhD from the University of Antwerp and has held visiting positions at the University of Melbourne and George Washington University.
Owen O’Donnell
Owen O’Donnell is Professor of Applied Economics at the Erasmus School of Economics and the Erasmus School of Health Policy & Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam, and a Research Fellow of the Tinbergen Institute. His research focuses on health economics, particularly health inequality, health and labour, health insurance and financial protection, and health behaviour and prevention. He applies economics to challenges facing health systems in low-, middle- and high-income countries. His work has been published in journals including the Journal of Health Economics, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Human Resources, Journal of Development Economics, Demography, The Lancet and PLOS Medicine. He is an Editor of the Journal of Health Economics. He obtained his DPhil from the University of York and has taught at the Universities of Macedonia, Lausanne, Kent and Wisconsin–Madison.
Matthew Robson
Matthew Robson is a Research Fellow at the Department of Economics and Related Studies, University of York. His research combines experimental and applied econometric methods to study inequality aversion, prosocial preferences and welfare economics, including responsibility-sensitive welfare weights for health and preferences for prioritisation by age and health. He has published in the Journal of Health Economics, the Journal of Economic Inequality, Social Science & Medicine and World Development, among others.
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