Aging and Inequality in Income and Health.

In our earlier work, we used data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) to examine life-cycle patterns in health status and in the joint distribution of health status and income (Deaton and Paxson, 1998). In this paper we summarize and extend those results, and provide new evidence from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Both surveys contain a measure of household income, and collect information on an ordinal measures of self-reported health status (SRHS) that ranges from 1 (excellent) to 5 (poor). Section I concerns problems related to the measurement of inequality in health. Section II presents evidence from the two surveys on health and income inequality.