We examine the relationship between income and health with the purpose of establishing the extent to which the distribution of health in a population contributes to income inequality and is itself a product of that inequality. The evidence supports a significant and substantial impact of...

The tools to be used and other choices to be made when measuring socioeconomic inequalities with rank-dependent inequality indices have recently been debated in this journal.This paper adds to this debate by stressing the importance of the measurement scale, by providing formal proofs of several...

This paper explores four alternative indices for measuring health inequalities in a way that takes into account attitudes towards inequality. First, we revisit the extended concentration index which has been proposed to make it possible to introduce changes into the distributional value...

Reliance on self‐rated health to proxy medical need can bias estimation of education‐related inequity in health care utilization. We correct this bias both by instrumenting self‐rated health with objective health indicators and by purging self‐rated health of reporting heterogeneity...

While it seems evident that occupations affect health, effect estimates are scarce. We use a job characteristics matrix in order to characterize occupations by their physical and psychosocial burden in German panel data spanning 26 years. Employing a dynamic model to control for factors that...

The Netherlands is among the top spenders on health in the OECD. We document the life-cycle profile, concentration and persistence of this expenditure using claims data covering both curative and long-term care expenses for the full Dutch population. Spending on health care is strongly...

While there is no doubt that health is strongly correlated with education, whether schooling exerts a causal impact on health is not yet firmly established. We exploit Dutch compulsory schooling laws in a Regression Discontinuity Desigh applied to linked data from health surveys, tax files and...

Anchoring vignettes are increasingly used to identify and correct heterogeneity in the reporting of health, work disability, life satisfaction, political efficacy, etc. with the aim of improving interpersonal comparability of subjective indicators of these constructs. The method relies on two...

The problem introduced by grouping income data when measuring socioeconomic inequalities in health (and health care) has been highlighted in a recent study in this journal. We re-examine this issue and show there is a tendency to underestimate the concentration index at an increasing rate when...

We apply the theory of inequality in opportunity to measure inequity in mortality. Our empirical work is based on a rich dataset for the Netherlands (1998-2007), linking information about mortality, health events and lifestyles. We show that distinguishing between different channels via which...