IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/kud/kucebi/2006.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Economic Resources, Mortality and Inequality

Author

Listed:
  • Orazio P. Attanasio

    (University College London, Department of Economics, Institute for Fiscal Studies and NBER)

  • Torben Heien Nielsen

    (CEBI, Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen)

Abstract

Using full-population register data from Denmark, this study shows that estimates of the economic gradient in mortality depends on the specific measure of economic resources used, where we investigate permanent income, annual income or financial and housing wealth. Our favorite measure is what we call �Permanent income�, that is the average level of income over a long interval. We find that when using annual income or current wealth, the gradient is overestimated, unless one controls for a number of additional variables, such as education, civil status and initial health. In the last part of the paper, we compare the results from Denmark to results from the UK. Although the countries are very different in terms of inequality, the estimates of the gradient we find are very similar, suggesting that differential levels of resources (including information), rather than inequality itself, determine the gradient in survival and mortality.

Suggested Citation

  • Orazio P. Attanasio & Torben Heien Nielsen, 2020. "Economic Resources, Mortality and Inequality," CEBI working paper series 20-06, University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics. The Center for Economic Behavior and Inequality (CEBI).
    • Handle: RePEc:kud:kucebi:2006
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econ.ku.dk/cebi/publikationer/working-papers/CEBI_WP_06-20.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Mortality; Permanent Income; Economic resources and Inequality;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • P16 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Capitalist Economies - - - Capitalist Institutions; Welfare State
    • E60 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - General
    • Z13 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology; Language; Social and Economic Stratification

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:kud:kucebi:2006. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Therese Moeller (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cebkudk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.