The importance of individual heterogeneity in the composition of measures of socioeconomic inequality in health: an approach based on quantile regression
View/ Open
Identifiers
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10317/1188Share
Metrics
Statistics
View Usage StatisticsMetadata
Show full item recordResearch Group
Grupo de I+D en Economía, Políticas Públicas y SaludKnowledge Area
Economía AplicadaSponsors
This paper derives from the project “Economic determinants of the distribution of health and health care in Europe” (known as the ECuity II Project), which is funded in part by the European Community’s Biomed II programme (contract BMH4-CT98-3352). We are grateful to the EC and to the Spanish Ministry of Education (grant PR2001-0295) and the Spanish DGES (project PB98-1058-C03-01) for financial support and to Statistics Canada for access to the NPHS data.Publication date
2002-06Publisher
Universidad Pompeu Fabra. Departamento de Economía y EmpresaBibliographic Citation
JONES, Andrew, LÓPEZ NICOLÁS, Ángel. The importance of individual heterogeneity in the gecomposition of measures of socioeconomic inequality in health: an approach based on quantile regression. Working Papers, 626: 26. Junio 2002Keywords
Desigualdades en saludHeterogeneidad incumplida
Regresión cuantil
Health inequalities
Unobserved heterogeneity
Quantile regression
Abstract
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.
Collections
- Artículos [1734]
The following license files are associated with this item:
Social media