Income Inequality and Health: Lessons from a Refugee Residential Assignment Program

Hans Grönqvist, Per Johansson and Susan Niknami

No 6554, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper examines the effect of income inequality on health for a group of particularly disadvantaged individuals: refugees. Our analysis draws on longitudinal hospitalization records coupled with a settlement policy where Swedish authorities assigned newly arrived refugees to their first area of residence. The policy was implemented in a way that provides a source of plausibly random variation in initial location. The results reveal no statistically significant effect of income inequality on the risk of being hospitalized. This finding holds also for most population subgroups and when separating between different types of diagnoses. Our estimates are precise enough to rule out large effects of income inequality on health.

Keywords: quasi-experiment; immigration; income inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 J15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2012-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea, nep-ltv and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Published - published in: Journal of Health Economics 2012, 31 (4), 617-629

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp6554.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Income inequality and health: Lessons from a refugee residential assignment program (2012)
Working Paper: Income inequality and health: lessons from a refugee residential assignment program (2012)
Working Paper: Income Inequality and Health: Lessons from a Refugee Residential Assignment Program (2012)
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:iza:izadps:dp6554

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().