@techreport{Frijters2005Socio,
abstract = {The socio-economic gradient in health remains a controversial topic in economics and other
social sciences. In this paper we develop a new duration model that allows for unobserved
persistent individual-specific health shocks and provides new evidence on the roles of socioeconomic
characteristics in determining length of life using 19-years of high-quality panel
data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. We also contribute to the rapidly growing
literature on life satisfaction by testing if more satisfied people live longer. Our results clearly
confirm the importance of income, education and marriage as important factors in
determining longevity. For example, a one-log point increase in real household monthly
income leads to a 12% decline in the probability of death. We find a large role for unobserved
health shocks, with 5-years of shocks explaining the same amount of the variation in length
of life as all the other observed individual and socio-economic characteristics (with the
exception of age) combined. Individuals with a high level of life satisfaction when initially
interviewed live significantly longer, but this effect is completely due to the fact that less
satisfied individuals are typically less healthy. We are also able to confirm the findings of
previous studies that self-assessed health status has significant explanatory power in
predicting future mortality and is therefore a useful measure of morbidity. Finally, we suggest
that the duration model developed in this paper is a useful tool when analyzing a wide-range
of single-spell durations where individual-specific shocks are likely to be important.},
author = {Paul Frijters and John P. Haisken-DeNew and Michael A. Shields},
copyright = {http://www.econstor.eu/dspace/Nutzungsbedingungen},
keywords = {C23; I1; 330; income; education; marriage; life satisfaction; shocks; mortality; duration; Sterblichkeit; Lebensqualit\"{a}t; Gesundheit; Einkommen; Bildungsniveau; Ehe; Sch\"{a}tzung; Deutschland; Lebenszufriedenheit},
language = {eng},
number = {1488},
title = {Socio-Economic Status, Health Shocks, Life Satisfaction and Mortality : Evidence from an Increasing Mixed Proportional Hazard Model},
type = {IZA Discussion paper series},
url = {http://hdl.handle.net/10419/20787},
year = {2005}
}
