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Income‐related reporting heterogeneity in self‐assessed health: evidence from France
Author(s) -
Etilé Fabrice,
Milcent Carine
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
health economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.55
H-Index - 109
eISSN - 1099-1050
pISSN - 1057-9230
DOI - 10.1002/hec.1164
Subject(s) - inequality , production (economics) , demographic economics , economics , actuarial science , mathematics , mathematical analysis , macroeconomics
This paper tests for income‐related reporting heterogeneity in self‐assessed health (SAH). It also constructs a synthetic measure of clinical health to decompose the effect of income on SAH into an effect on clinical health (which is called a health production effect) and a reporting heterogeneity effect. We find health production effects essentially for low‐income individuals, and reporting heterogeneity for the choice between the medium labels, i.e. ‘fair’ vs ‘good’ and for high‐income individuals. As such, SAH should be used cautiously for the assessment of income‐related health inequalities in France. It is however possible to minimize the reporting heterogeneity bias by converting SAH into a binary variable for poor health vs other health statuses. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.