Øystein Kravdal

http://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol18/7/

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Abstract
There is still much uncertainty about the impact of income inequality on health and mortality. Some studies have supported the original hypothesis about adverse effects, while others have shown no effects. One problem in these investigations is that there are many factors that may affect both income inequality and individual mortality but that cannot be adequately controlled for. The longitudinal Norwegian register data available for this study allowed municipality dummies to be included in the models to pick up time-invariant unobserved factors at that level. The results were compared with those from similar models without such dummies. The focus was on mortality in men and women aged 30-79 in the years 1980-2002, and the data included about 500000 deaths within 50 million person-years of exposure. While the models without municipality dummies suggested that income inequality in the municipality of residence, as measured by the Gini coefficient, had an adverse effect on mortality net of individual income, the results from the models that included such dummies were more mixed. Adverse effects appeared among the youngest, while among older men, there even seemed to be beneficial effects. In addition to illustrating the potential importance of controlling for unobserved factors by adding community dummies (doing a ‘fixed-effects analysis’ according to common terminology in econometrics), the findings should add to the scepticism about the existence of harmful health effects of income inequality, at least in the Nordic context.

Author's affiliation
Øystein Kravdal
University of Oslo, Norway

Keywords
fixed-effects, Gini Index, income, inequality, mortality, multilevel, municipality, Norway, registers

Word count (Main text)
8454

Other Articles by the same author/authors (in Demographic Research)

	[17-9] Effects of current education on second- and third-birth rates among Norwegian women and men born in 1964: Substantive interpretations and methodological issues
	[16-15] Does cancer affect the divorce rate?
	[15-1] A simulation-based assessment of the bias produced when using averages from small DHS clusters as contextual variables in multilevel models
	[10-1] Educational differentials in male mortality in Russia and northern Europe: A comparison of an epidemiological cohort from Moscow and St. Petersburg with the male populations of Helsinki and Oslo
	[9-2] The problematic estimation of "imitation effects" in multilevel models
	[6-10] The impact of individual and aggregate unemployment on fertility in Norway
	[6-9] Is the Previously Reported Increase in Second- and Higher-order Birth Rates in Norway and Sweden from the mid-1970s Real or a Result of Inadequate Estimation Methods?
	[5-6] The High Fertility of College Educated Women in Norway: An Artefact of the Separate Modelling of Each Parity Transition
	[3-3] A search for aggregate-level effects of education on fertility, using data from Zimbabwe
	[S3-6] An Illustration of the Problems Caused by Incomplete Education Histories in Fertility Analyses

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