Scandinavian Working Papers in Economics

Working Papers,
Lund University, Department of Economics

No 2011:9: Accounting for the dead in the longitudinal analysis of income-related health inequalities

Dennis Petrie (), Paul Allanson () and Ulf-G Gerdtham ()
Additional contact information
Dennis Petrie: Dept of Economics Studies, University of Dundee, Postal: Department of Economics Studies, University of Dundee, Nethergate, Dundee DD1 4HN, UK
Paul Allanson: Dept of Economics Studies, University of Dundee, Postal: Department of Economics Studies, University of Dundee, Nethergate, Dundee DD1 4HN, UK
Ulf-G Gerdtham: Department of Economics, Lund University, Postal: Department of Economics, School of Economics and Management, Lund University, Box 7082, S-220 07 Lund, Sweden

Abstract: This paper develops an accounting framework to consider the effect of deaths on the longitudinal analysis of income-related health inequalities. Ignoring deaths or using inverse probability weights to re-weight the sample for mortality-related attrition can produce misleading results. Incorporating deaths into the longitudinal analysis of income-related health inequalities provides a more complete picture in terms of the evaluation of health changes in respect to socioeconomic status. We illustrate our work by investigating health mobility from 1999 till 2004 using the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). When deaths are explicitly incorporated into the analysis it is found that over this five year period the relative health changes were significantly regressive such that the poor experienced a larger share of the health losses relative to their initial share of health and a large amount of this was related to mortality.

Keywords: QALYs; income-related health inequality; mobility analysis; longitudinal data; inverse probability weights

JEL-codes: D39; D63; I18

33 pages, February 4, 2011

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Published as
Dennis Petrie, Paul Allanson and Ulf-G Gerdtham, (2011), 'Accounting for the dead in the longitudinal analysis of income-related health inequalities', Journal of Health Economics, vol 30, no 5, pages 1113-1123

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