Paper #929

Title:

Allowing for heterogeneity in the decomposition of measures of inequality in health

Authors:

Andrew M. Jones and Ángel López

Date:

October 2004 (Revised: June 2005)

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.

Keywords:

Health inequalities, heterogeneity, decomposition analysis, panel data

JEL codes:

D63, I12, C21

Area of Research:

Labour, Public, Development and Health Economics

CRES Series number:

46

Published in:

Journal of Economic Inequality, vol 4(3), pp. 347-365. DOI: 10.1007/s10888-005-9019-z, 2006

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