Ricerc@Sapienza

The purpose of this project is to look through the distribution and so the evolution pre-and post crisis in Europe of self-assessed health (SAH) referred first to the entire sample over 50 and then to baby-boom generations (born between 1946 and 1964) respect to a socioeconomic variable as income and its variance.
The individual and household data employed in this study is intended to be drawn from the data panel of SHARE (Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe), composed by 6 waves (3rd wave is not useful for our study). SHARE, coordinated by the Mannheim Research Institute for the Economics of Aging (MEA), collects detailed information on a wide variety of aspects, among which the health status, health care access and socio-economic characteristics of people aged 50+ in Europe (Borsch-Supan and Jurges, 2005). For the aim of our study, we considered the imputed database version to mitigate the effects of some item non-responses.
After a general literature overview about the relationship between income and health and about the gradient in health outcomes, it will be shown the empirical methodology used to evaluate the degree of health disparities (O¿Donnell et al., 2008) across elderly people living in Europe during the selected waves from SHARE survey.
The aim is to compute the corrected concentration index (CI), which is a measure of income-related health inequalities by the variation of health across the income dimension (Erreygers, 2009; Erreygers and Van Ourti, 2011). Actually, we use the Erreygers index (EI) which is more prone to satisfy mirror conditions and other proprieties than CI, when we consider bounded variables.
EI summarizes the association of the health variable with the income distribution and it can be also disentangled by socioeconomic determinants and by other factor, using a decomposition methodology (Wagstaff et al., 2003).