Dr William Whittaker PhD

Health Economics Study Group (HESG)
Royal Economics Society (RES)
International Health Economics Association (iHEA)

Migration:
My PhD thesis: ‘Internal migration in Great Britain: causes and effects’ analysed;
1.  The determinants of internal migration (‘The Determinants of Internal Migration in Great Britain: A Duration Approach')
2. The effects migration has on wages, employment prospects (‘The Employment and Earnings of Migrants in Great Britain’)
3. The effects migration has on subjective well-being (‘The Pursuit of Happiness’) 
The PhD was supervised by Professor Martyn Andrews and Dr Ken Clark. Please contact me for the most up to date version of The Pursuit of Happiness

Work incapacity:
1. The effect of depression on work incapacity and State contributions ('Mental Health, work incapacity, and State transfers: an analysis of the British Household Panel Survey')
2.  Changes in depression and GP service use over the course of the work incapacity spell ('Predicting which people with psychosocial distress are at risk of becoming dependent on State benefits: an analysis of routinely available data')  
3. Variations in sickness absence by employer and employment sector type (paper available upon request)
4. Health problems and costs to the State (paper available upon request)

Dentistry:
1. The impact of the 2006 NHS dental reforms on dental visits and provider type (paper available upon request) 

Workforce planning:
1. Applying a needs-based approach to workforce planning in health care in England (paper available upon request)
2. Applying a needs-based approach to workforce planning in health care in Canada

Resource allocation:
1. I was involved in the formulation for the allocation of funds for prescribing and mental health care services 

Future research interests:
My research interests primarily represent my mixture of labour and health economics background. I am interested in the relationship between work incapacity and health, and would be interested in developing this further. I am also interested in health care resource allocation, either from a workforce planning prespective (how many are needed, when and where?) and from a budget setting perspective (how should health care budgets be distributed across health care providers?), with the latter I am particularly interested in assessing efficiency and equity impacts. Further research into the effects of internal migration on health inequalities would also interest me.


 

I am joint course director for the new MSc Economics (Economics of Health) programme

In 2003 I completed my BSc(Economics) with first class at Manchester. During the degree I became interested in both econometrics and the UK economy. I obtained an ESRC 1+3 award in 2003 which provided funding for my MSc(Economics and Econometrics) which was awarded in 2004 (which included a dissertation on the asymmetric costs of recession on UK regions), and my PhD 'Internal migration in Great Britain: causes and effects' which was supervised by Dr Ken Clark and Professor Martyn Andrews and was submitted in 2008. 

In October 2008 I was appointed as a Research Associate in Health Economics within the Health Methodology Research Group at the University of Manchester. Here I havedeveloped further interest in inequality and applied panel data methodology.

In March 2010 I was awarded with an ESRC/MRC/NIHR Early Careers Post Doctoral Fellowship in Health Economics which began September 2010 for two years, and includes research on associations between spousal health, the effect of different health conditions on contributions to the Exchequer, a continuation of my third PhD paper on the subjective well-being of migrants in Great Britain, and work on workforce planning in dentistry. 

PhD Economics
MSc Economics & Econometrics
BSc Economics

Labour Economics:
Martyn Andrews
Ken Clark

Health Economics:
Stephen Birch
Matt Sutton

PhD students:
Tom Mason
Tommy Allen