The Income-Health Relationship “Beyond the Meanâ€: New Evidence from Biomarkers

Vincenzo Carrieri and Andrew Jones

Health, Econometrics and Data Group (HEDG) Working Papers from HEDG, c/o Department of Economics, University of York

Abstract: This paper offers new evidence on the income-health relationship by analyzing the income gradient across the full distribution of four blood-based biomarkers: cholesterol, fibrinogen, glycated haemoglobin and ferritin. We use an unconditional quantile approach based on recentered influence function (RIF) regressions and apply an Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition at various quantiles of biomarker distributions to explain gender differentials in biomarkers. Using ten waves of the Health Survey for England (from 2003 to 2012) we find a non-linear relationship between income and biomarkers and a higher income gradient at the highest quantiles of the biomarker distributions. Moreover, we find that there is an important heterogeneity in the association of health to income across genders which varies significantly along the biomarker distribution and accounts for a substantial percentage of the gender differentials in observed health.

Keywords: biomarkers; unconditional quantile regression; decomposition analysis; health inequalities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C1 C5 I14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:yor:hectdg:15/22

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