The income-health gradient: Evidence from self-reported health and biomarkers in Understanding Society

This chapter adds to the literature on 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 the long-run and the short-run income gradients are more evident towards the right tails of the distributions, where both higher risk of illnesses and steeper income gradients are observed.