The European Journal of Health Economics

, Volume 14, Issue 3, pp 431–442 | Cite as

Welfare-related health inequality: does the choice of measure matter?

Original Paper
First Online:
Received:
Accepted:

Abstract

Using representative microdata from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), we show that the welfare measure choice has a substantial impact on the degree of welfare-related health inequality. To assess the sensitivity of welfare-related health inequality measures, we combine a unique set of income and wealth measures with different subjective, cardinalized, and (quasi-)objective health measures. The influence of the welfare measure is more pronounced when using subjective health measures than when using (quasi-)objective health measures.

Keywords

Welfare-related health inequality Concentration index Income measurement Wealth SOEP 

JEL Classifiaction

D31 I10 I12 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

We thank the editor, two anonymous referees, Cristina Blanco, Andrew Jones, Martin Karlsson, Jenny Kragl, Tom van Ourti, and participants at seminars in Darmstadt at the “Health. Happiness. Inequality–Modelling the Pathways between Income Inequality and Health” conference, as well as in Rome at the Meeting of the Applied Econometrics Association and the “Econometrics of Healthy Human Resources.” Special thanks go to Adam Lederer for co-editing this paper.

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag 2012

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.DIW Berlin, Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP)Berlin Institute of Technology (TU Berlin)BerlinGermany
  2. 2.Policy Analysis and Management (PAM)Cornell UniversityIthacaUSA
  3. 3.DIW BerlinBerlinGermany
  4. 4.IZABonnGermany

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