An age-cohort decomposition applied to panel data identifies how the mean, overall inequality and income-related inequality of self-assessed health evolve over the life cycle and differ across generations in 11 EU countries. There is a moderate and steady decline in mean health until the age of...

A strong relationship between health and socioeconomic status is firmly established. Yet, partly due to the multidimensional and dynamic nature of the variables, the causal mechanisms connecting them are poorly understood. This paper argues that adoption of a life-cycle perspective is essential...

While there is no doubt that health is strongly correlated with education, whether schooling exerts a causal impact on health is not yet firmly established. We exploit Dutch compulsory schooling laws in a Regression Discontinuity Design applied to linked data from health surveys, tax files and...

There is a concern that ordered responses on health questions may differ acrosspopulations or even across subgroups of a population. This reporting heterogeneity mayinvalidate group comparisons and measures of health inequality. This paper proposes a test fordifferential reporting in ordered...

Heterogeneity in reporting of health by socio-economic and demographic characteristics potentially biases the measurement of health disparities. We use anchoring vignettes to identify socio-demographic differences in the reporting of health in Indonesia, India and China. Homogeneous reporting by...

We examine the relationship between income and health with the purpose of establishing the extent to which the distribution of health in a population contributes to income inequality and is itself a product of that inequality. The evidence supports a significant and substantial impact of...

Europe aims at combining income growth with improvements in social cohesion as measured by income and health inequalities. We show that, theoretically, both aims can be reconciled only under very specific conditions concerning the type of growth and the income responsiveness of health. We...

In spite of the well-known wide disparities in wealth and in objective measures of health like mortality in countries like South Africa, health inequality by wealth in self-reported health measures appears to be nearly non-existent. We test and correct for reporting heterogeneity in sixteen...