A Theory of Socio-economic Disparities in Health over the Life Cycle

Titus Galama and Hans van Kippersluis

The Economic Journal, 2019, vol. 129, issue 617, 338-374

Abstract: Motivated by the observation that medical care explains only a relatively small part of the socio-economic status (SES)-health gradient, we present a life-cycle model that incorporates several additional behaviours that potentially explain (jointly) a large part of observed disparities. As a result, the model provides not only a conceptual framework for the SES-health gradient but more generally an improved framework for the production of health. We derive novel predictions from the theory by performing comparative dynamic analyses. More generally, our comparative dynamic method can be applied to models of similar form, e.g. human capital, health deficits, firm investment, to name a few.

Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (27)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/ecoj.12577 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: A Theory of Socioeconomic Disparities in Health Over the Life Cycle (2010)
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:oup:econjl:v:129:y:2019:i:617:p:338-374.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Economic Journal is currently edited by Francesco Lippi

More articles in The Economic Journal from Royal Economic Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press () and ().