Can self-assessed health (SAH) be relied upon to identify the true socioeconomic gradients in health status? The self-assessed health of Russian adults in 2002 shows remarkably little gradient with respect to economic welfare. We document this finding and assess its robustness to the assumptions...

This paper uses data from the Russian Longitudinal Survey that span the two recent economic recessions of 1998 and 2008 to study the effect of declining incomes on household composition. We hypothesize that individuals face a tradeoff between taking advantages of economies of scale and...