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A framework for testing the equality between the health concentration curve and the 45‐degree line
Author(s) -
Khaled Mohamad A.,
Makdissi Paul,
Tabri Rami V.,
Yazbeck Myra
Publication year - 2018
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.3637
Subject(s) - socioeconomic status , inequality , parametric statistics , health equity , econometrics , mathematics , test (biology) , degree (music) , statistics , regression , medicine , public health , environmental health , population , nursing , mathematical analysis , physics , acoustics , paleontology , biology
Summary The health concentration curve is the standard graphical tool to depict socioeconomic health inequality in the literature on health inequality. This paper shows that testing for the absence of socioeconomic health inequality is equivalent to testing if the conditional expectation of health on income is a constant function that is equal to average health status. In consequence, any test for parametric specification of a regression function can be used to test for the absence of socioeconomic health inequality (subject to regularity conditions). Furthermore, this paper illustrates how to test for this equality using a test for parametric regression functional form and applies it to health‐related behaviors from the National Health Survey 2014.