On the measurement of health and its effect on the measurement of health inequality

Erik Nesson and Joshua Robinson

Economics & Human Biology, 2019, vol. 35, issue C, 207-221

Abstract: We examine the extent to which self-reported health measures suffer from income-related reporting heterogeneity and then characterize how this reporting heterogeneity affects the estimation of income-related health inequality. We run a comprehensive set of tests of reporting heterogeneity using several self-reported health measures and several clinical measures of health from the National Health and Nutritional Examination Surveys. We propose the use of a multidimensional measure using clinical indicators of health in the context of measuring income-related health inequality, and we examine the extent of income-related health inequality, as measured by the concentration index, using both self-reported measures of health and the multidimensional clinical measure. Our results confirm the existence of significant, positive, income-related reporting heterogeneity and also suggest that higher income individuals react more strongly to a change in clinical health measures. Using self-assessed health suggests that income-related health inequality is about three times larger than when using more objective, self-reported health measures and ten times larger than when using the multidimensional clinical measure of health.

Keywords: Health inequality; Concentration index; Self-reported health; Self-assessed health; Allostatic load (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C43 I12 I14 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ehbiol:v:35:y:2019:i:c:p:207-221

DOI: 10.1016/j.ehb.2019.07.003

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