Children’s health and income: evolution of the gradient

ABSTRACT

This paper extends previous measurements of the children’s income-health gradient through 2015. We first replicate findings about the steepness of the gradient from 1986 to 2005. We then find that since 2005, the health gradient between children in low-income families and high-income families has flattened, but it still steepens with age. We also show that overall children’s health has improved since 2005.

KEYWORDS:

• Childhood health
• income
• gradient
• inequality

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I1
• I14

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Tsvetan Tsvetanov and Brian Staihr for their comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ See Appendix A for a full explanation of the imputation method and estimates which use a simpler midpoint method.

² Results are robust to including these children. See Appendix Table B1.

³ We repeated the analysis using an OLS probability model and obtained similar results. See Table 4.

⁴ See Appendix B for a recreation of CLP’s primary table and figure and a side-by-side comparison with the original.

⁵ –3.196*[ln($62,703+$23,037)-ln($62,703)] = −1.0.

⁶ Ibid.

Additional information

Funding

Partial funding for this project was from the Department of Economics at the University of Kansas.