Template-type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0
Author-Name: Pudney, Stephen
Author-Name: Booker, Cara
Title: In sickness and in health? Comorbidity in older couples
Abstract: We investigate the nature and origin of comorbidity, defined as the tendency of members of marital couples to display correlated patterns of ill-health in later life. In the absence of long-term prospective data on couples, we use long-range recall data from the pan-European SHARELife survey and estimate a latent variable model of the health states of marital part- ners in childhood, early adulthood and late adulthood. We find strong persistence in health states and a strong comorbidity correlation, attributable almost equally to homogamy in relation to early health and common factors operating within marriage.

Creation-Date: 20131210
Number: 2013-30
Publication-Status: published
File-URL: https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/files/working-papers/iser/2013-30.pdf
File-Format: Application/pdf
Handle: RePEc:ese:iserwp:2013-30