Heterogeneity, State Dependence and Health

Timothy J. Halliday

No 3463, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)

Abstract: We investigate the evolution of health over the life-cycle. We allow for two sources of persistence: unobserved heterogeneity and state dependence. Estimation indicates that there is a large degree of heterogeneity. For half the population, there are modest degrees of state dependence. For the other half of the population, the degree of state dependence is near unity. However, this may be the result of a high frequency of people in our data who never exit healthy states, potentially resulting in a failure to pin down the state dependence parameter for this segment of the population. We conclude that individual characteristics that trace back to early adulthood and before can have far reaching effects on health.

Keywords: health; dynamic panel data models; gradient (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I1 C5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
Date: Written
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Related works:
Working Paper: Heterogeneity, State Dependence and Health (2005)
Working Paper: Heterogeneity, State Dependence and Health (2007)
Journal Article: Heterogeneity, state dependence and health (2008)
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