Heterogeneity in reporting of health by socio-economic and demographic characteristics potentially biases the measurement of health disparities. Responses to anchoring vignettes have been proposed as a means of identifying reporting heterogeneity. We apply the vignette methodology to data from...

This paper develops an innovative method of constructing a concrete measure of health by taking into account individual health information. Using individual survey data from the 2002 IRDES Health and Health Insurance Survey, we propose a measurement of health based on the number of diseases and...

The reduction of inequalities in health and in the access to health services is one of the main objectives in any health care system. Various studies have analysed the existence of inequalities in health and in the use of health care for the Spanish population. However, the empirical evidence...

This paper investigates formation of expected longevity in an elderly popu- lation. We use Italian data from the early (2004) release of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). The SHARE provides a numerical measure for subjective survival probability (SSP). To assess...

The General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) is frequently used as a measure of mental well-being with those people with values below a certain threshold regarded as suffering from mental stress. Comparison of mental stress levels across populations may then be sensitive to the chosen threshold. This...

The General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) is frequently used as a measure of mental well-being. A consistent pattern across countries is that women report lower levels of mental well-being, as measured by the GHQ. This paper applies decomposition techniques to Irish data for 1994 and 2000 to...

This paper investigates gender differences in smoking behavior using data from the German Socio-economic Panel (SOEP). We develop a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition method for count data models which allows to isolate the part of the gender differential in the number of cigarettes daily smoked that...

Recent advances in the measurement of bi-dimensional poverty are applied to a measure of poverty which incorporates income and health poverty. The correlation between income and poverty is examined using the Receiver Operating Characteristics curve. Following from this unidimensional and...

This paper investigates the persistence in health limitations for individuals within the member states of the European Union. We use the full 8 waves of data available in the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) to explore the relative contributions of state dependence, unobserved...

We follow individuals as they retire using discrete-time hazard models applied to a stock sample from 12 waves of the British Household Panel Survey. Results confirm that health shocks are a determinant of retirement age and are quantitatively more important than pension entitlement. This is the...