TY - JOUR A1 - Jones, Andrew M. AU - López Nicolás, Ángel T1 - The importance of individual heterogeneity in the composition of measures of socioeconomic inequality in health: an approach based on quantile regression Y1 - 2002 UR - http://hdl.handle.net/10317/1188 AB - This paper shows how recently developed regression-based methods for the decomposition of health inequality can be extended to incorporate individual heterogeneity in the responses of health to the explanatory variables. We illustrate our method with an application to the Canadian NPHS of 1994. Our strategy for the estimation of heterogeneous responses is based on the quantile regression model. The results suggest that there is an important degree of heterogeneity in the association of health to explanatory variables which, in turn, accounts for a substantial percentage of inequality in observed health. A particularly interesting finding is that the marginal response of health to income is zero for healthy individuals but positive and significant for unhealthy individuals. The heterogeneity in the income response reduces both overall health inequality and income related health inequality. KW - Economía Aplicada KW - Desigualdades en salud KW - Heterogeneidad incumplida KW - Regresión cuantil KW - Health inequalities KW - Unobserved heterogeneity KW - Quantile regression LA - eng PB - Universidad Pompeu Fabra. Departamento de Economía y Empresa ER -