This project will address the question of health inequalities, by addressing the relationships between measures of socio-economic deprivation and respiratory health, particularly wheezing illnesses, asthma and lung function. The first part of the study will focus on the detailed information on respiratory health and socio-economic factors in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) to determine the association of socio-economic deprivation and respiratory outcomes during childhood. We will further investigate these associations by attempting to identify explanatory variables, including lifestyle (smoking, diet) and environmental exposures. Observed associations will then be examined using a lifecourse epidemiological approach to investigate whether associations that we observe in a contemporary population of children (ALSPAC) are reproducible across previous generations in the United Kingdom and whether deprivation in childhood is associated with adult respiratory outcomes, independently of adult socio-economic status. In turn, this will allow us to explore the possible effects of social mobility on adult respiratory health. The project brings together expertise on the analysis of inequalities in health from an economics perspective, with a focus on measures of access to resources, and the exploitation of dynamics in data and the use of GIS tools to map local features to individuals (in the Department of Economics), childhood respiratory epidemiology, including assessment of asthma and lung function in a longitudinal birth cohort sample (Department of Community-based Medicine) and the multidisciplinary specialty of lifecourse epidemiology, including access to archived information on other existing cohorts (Department of Social Medicine). Therefore, this is a unique opportunity to build a global, comprehensive picture of the factors associated with socio-economic deprivation in the U.K. and their potential effects on an important aspect of public health.