The Income-Health Gradient: Evidence From Self-Reported Health and Biomarkers in Understanding Society

This chapter adds to the literature about the income-health gradient by exploring the association of short- and long-term income with a wide set of self-reported health measures and objective nurse-administered and blood-based biomarkers, as well as employing estimation techniques that allow for analysis beyond the mean. The income-health gradients are greater in magnitude in case of long-run rather than cross-sectional income measures. Unconditional quantile regressions reveal that the differences between long-run and the short-run income gradients are more evident toward the right tails of the distributions, where both higher risk of illnesses and steeper income gradients are observed