Inequality measurement for ordered response health data

Ramses Abul Naga and Tarik Yalcin

Journal of Health Economics, 2008, vol. 27, issue 6, 1614-1625

Abstract: Because self-reported health status [SRHS] is an ordered response variable, inequality measurement for SRHS data requires a numerical scale for converting individual responses into a summary statistic. The choice of scale is however problematic, since small variations in the numerical scale may reverse the ordering of a given pair of distributions of SRHS data in relation to conventional inequality indices such as the variance. This paper introduces a parametric family of inequality indices, founded on an inequality ordering proposed by Allison and Foster [Allison, R.A., Foster, J., 2004. Measuring health inequalities using qualitative data. Journal of Health Economics 23, 505-524], which satisfy a suitable invariance property with respect to the choice of numerical scale. Several key members of the parametric family are also derived, and an empirical application using data from the Swiss Health Survey illustrates the proposed methodology.

Keywords: Self-reported; health; status; Inequality; orderings; Inequality; measures (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (127)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167-6296(08)00099-4
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Inequality Measurement forOrdered Response Health Data (2007)
Working Paper: Inequality measurement for ordered response health data (2007)
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:jhecon:v:27:y:2008:i:6:p:1614-1625

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Health Economics is currently edited by J. P. Newhouse, A. J. Culyer, R. Frank, K. Claxton and T. McGuire

More articles in Journal of Health Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().