This paper introduces a new approach to measuring the association between health and socioeconomic status. Measuring inequalities in health is difficult when health is measured qualitatively, specifically on an ordinal scale. This paper demonstrates a rank-based dependence measure - the copula - that is invariant to both the scale and any monotonic transformations of its dimensions. Accordingly, the copula measure of association between health and income is robust under different cardinal scales for health as well as different income distributions, and can be used for ordering countries. The copula is also used to generate contingency tables of joint probability, which illustrate how this ordering can be due to polarity in the distributions of health and income, as well as stronger association between the distributions of health and income.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)