Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/223734 
Year of Publication: 
2020
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 13292
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
We present a comprehensive analysis of ex ante inequality of opportunity (IOp) in health among Chinese adults aged 60+ and decompose the contributions of different sets of circumstances. Data are drawn from the 2011 and 2015 waves of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) linked with the 2014 CHARLS Life History Survey. We use a range of blood-based biomarkers, and apply a re-centered influence function (RIF) approach and a Shapley-Shorrocks decomposition to partition the contribution of circumstances across different quantiles of the biomarker distributions. We find that IOp accounts for between 3.75% and 29.57% of total health inequality in old age across the range of biomarkers. Shapley-Shorrocks decompositions show that spatial circumstances such as urban/rural residence and province of residence are the dominant determinants of IOp for most of the biomarkers. Distributional decompositions further reveal that the relative contributions to IOp in health of household socioeconomic status and health and nutrition conditions in childhood increase towards the right tails of the distribution for most of the biomarkers, where the clinical risk is focused.
Subjects: 
biomarkers
CHARLS
China
inequality of opportunity
Shapley-Shorrocks decomposition
unconditional quantile regressions
JEL: 
D63
I12
I14
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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