EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Income inequality and self-rated health in US metropolitan areas: A multi-level analysis

Russ Lopez

Social Science & Medicine, 2004, vol. 59, issue 12, 2409-2419

Abstract: Income inequality has been found to affect health in a number of international and cross-national studies. Using data from a telephone survey of adults in the United States, this study analyzed the effect of metropolitan level income inequality on self-rated health. It combined individual data from the 2000 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System with metropolitan level income data from the 2000 Census. After controlling for smoking, age, education, Black race, Hispanic ethnicity, sex, household income, and metropolitan area per capita income, this study found that for each 1 point rise in the GINI index (on a hundred point scale) the risk of reporting Fair or Poor self-rated health increased by 4.0% (95% confidence interval 1.6-6.5%). Given that self-rated health is a good predictor of morbidity and mortality, this suggests that metropolitan area income inequality is affecting the health of US adults.

Keywords: Income inequality Self-rated health GINI; Metropolitan USA (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (24)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277-9536(04)00165-0
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:eee:socmed:v:59:y:2004:i:12:p:2409-2419

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
http://www.elsevier. ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

Access Statistics for this article

Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian

More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:59:y:2004:i:12:p:2409-2419