The income-health gradient: evidence from self-reported health and biomarkers using longitudinal data on income

Michaela Benzeval, Apostolos Davillas and Andrew Jones

No 2017-03, ISER Working Paper Series from Institute for Social and Economic Research

Abstract: This paper adds to the literature on the income-health gradient by exploring the association of short- and long-term income with a wide set of self-reported health measures and objective nurse-administered and blood-based biomarkers as well as employing estimation techniques that allow for analysis “beyond the mean†and accounting for unobserved heterogeneity. The income-health gradients are greater in magnitude in case of long-run rather than cross- sectional income measures. Unconditional quantile regressions reveal that the differences between the long-run and the short-run income gradients are more evident towards the right tails of the distributions, where both higher risk of illnesses and steeper income gradients are observed. A two-step estimator, involving a fixed-effects income model at the first stage, shows that the individual-specific selection effects have a systematic impact in the long-run income gradients in self-reported health but not in biomarkers, highlighting the importance of reporting error in self-reported health.

Date: 2017-03-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/fi ... ers/iser/2017-03.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The income-health gradient: Evidence from self-reported health and biomarkers using longitudinal data on income (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ese:iserwp:2017-03

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
Publications Office, Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, Essex CO4 3SQ UK
https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/publications/

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ISER Working Paper Series from Institute for Social and Economic Research Publications Office, Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, Essex CO4 3SQ UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jonathan Nears ().