 Measuring the spatial distribution of health rankings in the United StatesWill Davis, Alexander Gordan and Rusty Tchernis Health Economics, 2021, vol. 30, issue 11, 2921-2936 Abstract: We rank counties in the United States with respect to population health. We utilize the five observable county health variables used to construct the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute's County Health Rankings (CHRs). Our method relies on a Bayesian factor analysis model that estimates data‐driven weights for our rankings, incorporates county population sizes into the level of rank uncertainty, and allows for spillovers of health stock across county lines. We find that demographic and economic variation explains a large portion of the variation in health rankings. We address the importance of uncertainty caused by imputation of missing data and show that there is a substantial quantity of uncertainty in rankings throughout the rank distribution. Analyzing the health of counties both within and across state lines shows notable degrees of disparity in county health. While we find some disagreement between the ranks of our model and the CHRs, we show that there is additional information gained by utilizing the rankings produced by both methods. Date: 2021 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:hlthec:v:30:y:2021:i:11:p:2921-2936 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. |
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