Inequality, Health, and Smoking

Sammanfattning: This thesis consists of five self-contained, yet related, research papers, which all contribute to the economic literature on socioeconomic differences in health and health related behavior. The first two papers provide a compass in the discussion of how to measure health inequality and, more specifically, how to adjust measures and concepts when moving from an unbounded income variable to a bounded (or binary) health variable. The first paper reconciles the debate between Guido Erreygers and Adam Wagstaff in the leading health economic journals by scrutinizing the value judgments implicit in their respective version of the Concentration Index. The second paper focuses on how the boundedness of health variables ought to affect our perception of what distributional change preserves the level of inequality. The third paper reports results from a large survey experiment contributing to the literature on measurement error of self-reported data in analysis of health care inequality. By comparing registered with self-reported hospitalizations of respondents exposed to recall periods of one, three, six, or twelve months, the experiment examines how the length of the recall period affects the recall error of self-reported data in two dimensions: an aggregate of hospitalization and the association with socioeconomic variables. The final two papers contribute to the empirical literature on socioeconomic differences in smoking, exploiting smoking information from Statistics Sweden’s Survey of Living Conditions (ULF) 1980-2005, complemented with registry data on income and education. The first of these two papers examines how state dependency, or addiction, varies with educational attainments. The final paper measures, and decomposes, long-run income-related smoking inequality. The contribution of the paper is also methodological, as it suggests an extension of the standard decomposition of the concentration index, and demonstrates the importance of accounting for the potential pathways through which socioeconomic background may affect smoking inequality.