Steve is an applied econometrician working mainly on health and disability issues. Before joining ScHARR as (part-time) Professor of Health Econometrics, he was Director of Research at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) at the University of Essex. He remains co-Director of the ESRC Research Centre on Micro-Social Change and a member of the scientific leadership team of the Understanding Society household panel survey, both based at ISER.
Steve is currently involved in research projects in a number of health-related areas. One is the distributional character of public policy for older disabled people, particularly the target efficiency of the social care / disability benefit system. This involves extending conventional measures of income inequality and poverty to take account of estimates of the personal costs of disability. A second project looks at survey measurement of health, and particularly the use of blood-based biomarkers as health indicators for research on social science issues. A third, MRC-funded, project in collaboration with Monica Hernandez and Allan Wailoo, is examining the statistical problems of integrating evidence on quality of life from different measurement instruments, such as EQ-5D, HUI and SF-6D.
