On the empirical association between poor health and low socioeconomic status at old age

Christian Salas

Health Economics, 2002, vol. 11, issue 3, 207-220

Abstract: Epidemiologic studies using mortality rates as indicators of health fail to find any meaningful association between poor health and low socioeconomic status in older age‐groups, whereas economic studies using self‐assessed health consistently find a significant positive correlation, even after controlling for self‐reporting errors. Such contradictory results have not been reported for working age individuals. A simple explanation might be that the elderly samples on which the epidemiologic and economic studies are based come from different populations. However, this paper shows that similar contradictory results are obtained even when the same samples are used, simply by switching between self‐assessed health and mortality as health indicators. An alternative explanation is proposed, namely that these health indicators yield different results because they relate to different ranges of the latent health variable at old age. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Date: 2002
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (27)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/hec.663

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:wly:hlthec:v:11:y:2002:i:3:p:207-220

Access Statistics for this article

Health Economics is currently edited by Alan Maynard, John Hutton and Andrew Jones

More articles in Health Economics from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().