Mortality, Health Status, and Wealth

Abstract

In this paper we use the two waves of the British Retirement Survey (1988/1989 and 1994) to quantify the relationship between socioeconomic status and health outcomes. We find that, even after conditioning on the initial health status, wealth rankings are important determinants of mortality and the evolution of the health indicator in the survey. For men aged 65 moving from the 40th percentile to the 60th percentile in the wealth distribution increases the probability of survival by between 1.0 and 1.9 percentage points depending on the measure of wealth used. A similar effect is found for women of between 1.1 and 1.3 percentage points. In the process of estimating these effects we control for nonrandom attrition from our sample. (JEL: I2, J19)

Differential mortality by lifetime earnings in Germany

“…Since there is no reason to expect this finding to reverse in Germany, this is supportive of our claim that we cannot identify people at the lower end of the distribution very well and mortality conditional on correctly measured income would be much higher. Finally, turning back to Europe, Attanasio and Emmerson (2003) show that the position in the wealth ranking has a large impact on survival probabilities in the UK. Palme and Sandgren (2004) are able to construct a measure of lifetime income for a cohort born in 1928 in the city of Malmö, Sweden.…”

Inheritance in Germany 1911 to 2009: A Mortality Multiplier Approach

“…But Source: SOEP v27, own calculations. Attanasio & Emmerson (2003) relate the position in the wealth ranking to survival probabilities for the UK and also find evidence for differential mortality. So, considering the available evidence, and given that ranks of individuals in income and wealth distribution are closely related, we have enough reasons to take differential mortality into account when it comes to estimate µ t .…”

The changing face of retirement: future patterns of work, health, care and income among the older population

“…13 Previous work in the UK has found a relationship between position in the wealth distribution and subsequent mortality (Attanasio and Emmerson, 2003) (11% compared with 8%), while for women the relationship is slightly stronger, at 1.7 times as likely (9% compared with 6%). This means that as we project further forwards in time, our model predicts that the population within each birth cohort will become disproportionately comprised of individuals from towards the top of the 2010-11 wealth distribution.…”