Abstract
This paper shows how recently developed regression-based methods for the decomposition of health inequality can be extended to incorporate heterogeneity in the responses of health to the explanatory variables. We illustrate our method with an application to the GHQ measure of psychological well-being taken from the British Household Panel Survey. The results suggest that there is an important degree of heterogeneity in the association of health to explanatory variables across birth cohorts and genders which, in turn, accounts for a substantial percentage of the inequality in observed health.
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*Data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) were supplied by the ESRC Data Archive. Neither the original collectors of the data nor the Archive bear any responsibility for the analysis or interpretations presented here. This chapter derives from the project “The dynamics of income, health and inequality over the lifecycle” (known as the ECuity III Project), which is funded in part by the European Community's Quality of Life and Management of Living Resources programme (contract QLK6-CT-2002-02297) and the project “La dinámica del estado de salud y los factores socieconómicos a lo largo del ciclo vital. Implicaciones para las políticas públicas”, which is supported by the Fundación BBVA.
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Jones, A.M., López Nicolás, Á. Allowing for heterogeneity in the decomposition of measures of inequality in health*. J Econ Inequal 4, 347–365 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10888-005-9019-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10888-005-9019-z