Journal Article
Ex ante inequality of opportunity in health, decomposition and distributional analysis of biomarkers
Authors
Publication date
Jan 2020
Summary
We use a set of biomarkers to measure inequality of opportunity (IOp) in the risk of major chronic conditions in the UK. Applying a direct ex ante IOp approach, we find that inequalities in biomarkers attributed to circumstances account for a non-trivial part of the total variation. For example, observed circumstances account for 20 % of the total inequalities in our composite measure of multi-system health risk, allostatic load. We propose an extension to the decomposition of ex ante IOp to complement the mean-based approach, analysing the contribution of circumstances across the quantiles of the biomarker distributions. Shapley decompositions show that, for most of the biomarkers, the percentage contribution of socioeconomic circumstances (education and childhood socioeconomic status), relative to differences attributable to age and gender, increase towards the right tail of the biomarker distribution, where health risks are more pronounced.
Published in
Journal of Health Economics
Volume
69:102251
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhealeco.2019.102251
ISSN
16
Subjects
Economics, Health, and Biology
Links
University of Essex, Albert Sloman Library Periodicals *restricted to University of Essex registered users* - https://lib.essex.ac.uk/iii/encore/record/C__Rb1646439?lang=eng
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