Spillover effects of retirement: Does health vulnerability matter?

The current literature investigating the impact of retirement and the associated spousal spillover effects overlooks the unintended effects of retirement on spouses in vulnerable health, namely spouses with long-term health conditions (LTHCs). In this paper, we fill this gap in the literature and investigate the impact of an individual's retirement on their partner's health outcomes when their partner has LTHCs. Given the inherent identification challenges associated with entry into retirement, we use the pension-qualifying age in Australia as an instrument.

On absolute socioeconomic health inequality comparisons.

This paper introduces a new graphical tool: the mean deviation concentration curve. Using a unified approach, we derive the associated dominance conditions that identify robust rankings of absolute socioeconomic health inequality for all indices obeying Bleichrodt and van Doorslaer's (J Health Econ 25:945-957, 2006) principle of income-related health transfer. We also derive dominance conditions that are compatible with other transfer principles available in the literature.

A Pragmatic Method for Identification of Long-Stay Patients in the PICU.

Objectives: To develop a pragmatic method of identifying long-stay patients (LSPs) in the PICU.

Methods: We surveyed 40 expert stakeholders in 14 Canadian PICUs between February 2015 and March 2015 to identify key factors to use for defining LSPs in the PICU. We then describe a pragmatic method using these factors to analyze 523 admissions to an academic, tertiary-care PICU from February 1, 2015, to January 31, 2016.

A framework for testing the equality between the health concentration curve and the 45-degree line.

The health concentration curve is the standard graphical tool to depict socioeconomic health inequality in the literature on health inequality. This paper shows that testing for the absence of socioeconomic health inequality is equivalent to testing if the conditional expectation of health on income is a constant function that is equal to average health status. In consequence, any test for parametric specification of a regression function can be used to test for the absence of socioeconomic health inequality (subject to regularity conditions).

Income-related health transfers principles and orderings of joint distributions of income and health.

The objective of this article is to provide the analyst with the necessary tools that allow for a robust ordering of joint distributions of health and income. We contribute to the literature on the measurement and inference of socioeconomic health inequality in three distinct but complementary ways. First, we provide a formalization of the socioeconomic health inequality-specific ethical principle introduced by Erreygers et al.

Robust rankings of socioeconomic health inequality using a categorical variable.

When assessing socioeconomic health inequalities, researchers often draw upon measures of income inequality that were developed for ratio scale variables. As a result, the use of categorical data (such as self-reported health status) produces rankings that may be arbitrary and contingent to the numerical scale adopted. In this paper, we develop a method that overcomes this issue by providing conditions for which these rankings are invariant to the numerical scale chosen by the researcher.

Avoiding blindness to health status in health achievement and health inequality measurement.

The concentration index, being focused on the socioeconomic dimension of health inequality and overlooking aversion to pure health inequality, can produce ethically contestable rankings of health distributions. A health transfer from a sicker but richer individual to healthier but poorer individual will decrease the concentration index. This paper presents a new class of health inequality indices that avoid this limitation by trading off socioeconomic-related health inequality against pure health inequality.

Peer effects, fast food consumption and adolescent weight gain.

This paper aims at opening the black box of peer effects in adolescent weight gain. Using Add Health data on secondary schools in the U.S.

Measuring socioeconomic health inequalities in presence of multiple categorical information.

While many of the measurement approaches in health inequality measurement assume the existence of a ratio-scale variable, most of the health information available in population surveys is given in the form of categorical variables. Therefore, the well-known inequality indices may not always be readily applicable to measure health inequality as it may result in the arbitrariness of the health concentration index's value. In this paper, we address this problem by changing the dimension in which the categorical information is used.