Department of Economics, Miller College of Business, Ball State University, Muncie, IN, United States; NBER, United States.
Department of Marketing, Industrial Distribution, and Economics, Collat School of Business, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL, United States.
Econ Hum Biol. 2019 Dec;35:207-221. doi: 10.1016/j.ehb.2019.07.003. Epub 2019 Jul 27.
We examine the extent to which self-reported health measures suffer from income-related reporting heterogeneity and then characterize how this reporting heterogeneity affects the estimation of income-related health inequality. We run a comprehensive set of tests of reporting heterogeneity using several self-reported health measures and several clinical measures of health from the National Health and Nutritional Examination Surveys. We propose the use of a multidimensional measure using clinical indicators of health in the context of measuring income-related health inequality, and we examine the extent of income-related health inequality, as measured by the concentration index, using both self-reported measures of health and the multidimensional clinical measure. Our results confirm the existence of significant, positive, income-related reporting heterogeneity and also suggest that higher income individuals react more strongly to a change in clinical health measures. Using self-assessed health suggests that income-related health inequality is about three times larger than when using more objective, self-reported health measures and ten times larger than when using the multidimensional clinical measure of health.
我们考察了自报健康测量值在多大程度上受到与收入相关的报告异质性的影响，然后描述了这种报告异质性如何影响收入相关健康不平等的估计。我们使用来自国家健康和营养检查调查的几种自我报告的健康测量值和几种临床健康测量值，对报告异质性进行了一系列全面的测试。我们提出在衡量收入相关健康不平等时使用多维健康临床指标的方法，并使用自我报告的健康测量值和多维临床健康测量值，来考察收入相关健康不平等的程度，这一程度可以用集中指数来衡量。我们的结果证实了存在显著的、正向的、与收入相关的报告异质性，还表明收入较高的个体对临床健康测量值的变化反应更强烈。使用自我评估的健康状况表明，收入相关的健康不平等程度大约是使用更客观的自我报告健康测量值时的三倍，是使用多维临床健康测量值时的十倍。
