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 Desigh applied to linked data from health surveys, tax files and...

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...

While it seems evident that occupations affect health, effect estimates are scarce. We use a job characteristics matrix in order to characterize occupations by their physical and psychosocial burden in German panel data spanning 26 years. Employing a dynamic model to control for factors that...

This paper explores four alternative indices for measuring health inequalities in a way that takes into account attitudes towards inequality. First, we revisit the extended concentration index which has been proposed to make it possible to introduce changes into the distributional value...

We apply the theory of inequality in opportunity to measure inequity in mortality. Our empirical work is based on a rich dataset for the Netherlands (1998-2007), linking information about mortality, health events and lifestyles. We show that distinguishing between different channels via which...

The problem introduced by grouping income data when measuring socioeconomic inequalities in health (and health care) has been highlighted in a recent study in this journal. We re-examine this issue and show there is a tendency to underestimate the concentration index at an increasing rate when...

The tools to be used and other choices to be made when measuring socioeconomic inequalities with rank-dependent inequality indices have recently been debated in this journal.This paper adds to this debate by stressing the importance of the measurement scale, by providing formal proofs of several...

Wealthier individuals engage in healthier behavior. This paper seeks to explain this phenomenon by developing a theory of health behavior, and exploiting both lottery winnings and inheritances to test the theory. We distinguish between the direct monetary cost and the indirect health cost (value...

How to design an attractive annuity for an undeveloped market and how to assess the potential demand for such a product? We first conduct a discrete choice experiment among participants of a large-scale occupational defined contribution pension scheme in Hong Kong to identify desired product...

There is a persistent association between health and portfolio choice, but hardly anything is known about the underlying sources of heterogeneity: what makes healthier individuals hold more risky assets? This paper uses rich Dutch longitudinal data to take into account and explain unobserved...