This thesis is composed of four independent empirical essays that draw on and contribute to aspects of health, urban, public, and environmental economics. The chapters can be split into two distinct parts. The first part comprises two chapters that provide new quantitative evidence about the impacts of recent health care policies in the English National Health Service (NHS). While essentially describing policy evaluations, the essays provide insights into the underlying economic forces of health care demand and supply, and are linked to the urban economics literature by an explicit consideration of spatial issues. The second part comprises two further chapters that focus on a core urban economics topic — housing markets — placing particular emphasis on specific links between housing and environmental issues. The unifying theme, and overriding contribution, of the thesis is to bring fresh evidence to bear on policy-relevant issues in urban and public economics by the generation of new datasets and the application of econometric techniques.