Objective: To examine the association of income inequality at the public health unit level with individual health status in Ontario. Methods: Cross-sectional multilevel study carried out among subjects aged 25 years or older residing in 42 public health units in Ontario. Individual-level data drawn from 30,939 respondents in 1996-97 Ontario Health Survey. Median area income and income inequalit...

The link between income and subjective satisfaction with one’s financial situation is explored in this paper using a panel analysis of 1,998 individuals tracked through the course of the boom period in Ireland, 1994-2001. A dynamic ordered probit model which incorporates state dependence and controls for correlated individual effects and the initial conditions problem is applied. The impact of ...

Does individual well-being depend on the absolute level of income and consumption or is it relative to one’s aspirations? In a direct empirical test, it is found that higher income aspirations reduce people’s utility, ceteris paribus. Thereby, individual data on reported satisfaction with life are used as a proxy measure for utility, and income evaluation measures are applied as proxies for peo...

OBJECTIVES This study examines the association of neighbourhood low income and income inequality with individual health outcomes in Toronto, Canada's largest census metropolitan area. DATA SOURCES The data are from the cross-sectional component of Statistics Canada's 1996/97 National Population Health Survey (NPHS) and the 1996 Census of Population. ANALYTICAL TECHNIQUES Individual records ...

There is a very large literature that examines the relationship between health and income. Two main hypotheses have been investigated: the relative income hypothesis and the absolute income hypothesis. Most of previous studies that used mortality data have been criticized for estimating an aggregate model that does not account for non-linear links between health and income at the individual lev...

A framework is developed to analyse the impact of the distribution of income on individual health and health inequality, with individual health modelled as a function of income and the distribution of income. It is demonstrated that the impact of income inequality can generate non-concave health production functions resulting in a non-concave health production possibility frontier. In this cont...

OBJECTIVE Elderly choose between utilizing private or public health care providers based on their socioeconomic, demographic, and epidemiological condition. The purposes of this study was to evaluate how these factors affect the choice of health care provider and to compare the impact of their choice on individual and family income. METHODS Data from 7,920 elders interviewed in a study of the...

How Reliable Are Income Data Collected with a Single Question? Income is an important correlate for numerous phenomena in the social sciences. But many surveys collect data with just a single question covering all forms of income. This raises issues of quality, and these are heightened when individuals are asked about the household total rather than own income alone. Data are typically banded, ...

An econometric model is specified in which an individual’s income and the income mix of the neighbourhood in which the individual resides are endogenous, thus providing a holistic model of phenomena that previously have been fragmented into neighbourhood effects and neighbourhood selection literatures. To overcome the biases from selection and endogeneity, the parameters of this model are estim...