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...

Little is known about what the economic crisis has done to health disparities by income. We apply a decomposition method to unravel the contributions of income growth, income inequality and differential income mobility across socio-demographic groups to changes in health disparities by income in...

It is well known that income and health are positively associated. Much less is known about the strength of this association in times of growth and recession. We develop a novel decomposition method that focuses on isolating the roles played by government transfers versus market transfers on...

Although there is a large gap between Black and White American life expectancies, the gap fell 48.9% between 1990-2018, mainly due to mortality declines among Black Americans. We examine age-specific mortality trends and racial gaps in life expectancy in rich and poor U.S. areas and with...

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...

Ill-health can be expected to reduce employment and income. But are the effects sustained over time? Do they differ across the income distribution? And are there spillover effects on the employment and income of the spouse? We use matching combined with difference-in-differences to identify the...

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...

We investigate whether later educational tracking reduced the intergenerational persistence of socioeconomic disparities in mortality in Finland,where the tracking age was raised from 11 to 16 in the 1970s. We use a difference-in-differences approach that exploits the gradual rollout of the...

The measurement of health disparities is a key component for the assessment of health systems. One aspect of these disparities – which hitherto has received limited attention – is the risk people face about their future health. This paper integrates risk into the standard inequality...