The Role of Child Health and Economic Status in Educational, Health and Labour Market Outcomes in Young Adulthood

The Ontario Child Health Study provides the first opportunity in Canada to assess directly the relationship between socio-economic and health status in childhood and levels of completed schooling, health status and labour market success in young adulthood. We find that childhood health problems are negatively associated with educational attainment, especially the probability of a university degree, and the health status of young adults. Our results also imply that childhood health problems influence adult labour force outcomes, especially for males, mainly through adult levels of schooling and health.Child Health; Adult Outcomes

Simulation-based Inference in Dynamic Panel Probit Models: an Application to Health

This paper considers the determinants of a binary indicator for the existence of functional limitations using seven waves (1991-1997) of the British Household Panel Survey(BHPS). The focal point of our analysis is a consideration of the relative contributions of state dependence, heterogeneity and serial correlation in expanding the dynamics of health. To investigate these issues we apply static and dynamic panel probit models with flexible error structures. To estimate the models we show strong positive state dependence, with the effect for men around 150% of the effect for women.

The Evolution of Health Outcomes from Childhood to Adolescence

NOTE: The peer-reviewed version of this paper is available online from the Journal of Health Economics at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhealeco.2010.10.007 The authors\u27 manuscript of it is available as the additional file listed below. Using data from the Canadian National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY), this study examines how and why health outcomes exhibit persistence during the period from childhood to adolescence. We examine the distribution of health outcomes and health transitions using descriptive analysis and explore the determinants of these distributions by estimating the contributions of family SES, unobserved heterogeneity and state dependence and also allowing for heterogeneity of state dependence parameters across categories of neighborhood status. Our analysis indicates that children living in poorer neighborhoods and in neighborhoods with lower education level tend to experience poor health status for longer after a transition to it, while children tend to experience multiple health drops living in poorer neighborhoods, in neighborhoods with less educated people, in neighborhoods with more families headed by lone-parents and in neighborhoods with more families living in rental accommodations. Junhu Li is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Economics at McMaster University. Her research fields are health economics and applied econometrics. She is interested in the analysis of dynamics and determinants of child health outcomes, and policy analysis of health care financing and funding reforms. Her recent research is on two topics. The first topic is on the evolution of health outcomes from childhood to adolescence using Canadian survey data NLSCY. The second topic is on the empirical identification of physician response to pay-for-performance incentives by exploiting the quasi-natural-experiment in the primary care reform models in Ontario, Canada

Using Simulation-based Inference with Panel Data in Health Economics

Panel datasets provide a rich source of information for health economists, offering the scope to control for individual heterogeneity and to model the dynamics of individual behaviour. However the qualitative or categorical measures of outcome often used in health economics create special problems for estimating econometric models. Allowing a flexible specification of the autocorrelation induced by individual heterogeneity leads to models involving higher order integrals that cannot be handled by conventional numerical methods. The dramatic growth in computing power over recent years has been accompanied by the development of simulation-based estimators that solve this problem. This review uses binary choice models to show what can be done with conventional methods and how the range of models can be expanded by using simulation methods. Practical applications of the methods are illustrated using data on health from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS).

Using Simulation-Based Inference with Panel Data in Health Economics

Panel datasets provide a rich source of information for health economists, offering the scope to control for individual heterogeneity and to model the dynamics of individual behaviour. However the qualitative or categorical measures of outcome often used in health economics create special problems for estimating econometric models. Allowing a flexible specification of individual heterogeneity leads to models involving higher order integrals that cannot be handled by conventional numerical methods. The dramatic growth in computing power over recent years has been accompanied by the development of simulation estimators that solve this problem. This review uses binary choice models to show what can be done with conventional methods and how the range of models can be expanded by using simulation methods. Practical applications of the methods are illustrated using on health from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS)Econometrics, panel data, simulation methods, determinants of health

Socioeconomic Status, Health and Lifestyle

The role of lifestyle in mediating the relationship between socio-economic characteristics and and health has been discussed extensively in the epidemiological and economic literatures. Previous analyses have not considered a formal framework incorporating unobservable heterogeneity. In this paper we develop a simple economic model in which health is determined (partially) by lifestyle, which depends on preferences, budget and time constraints and unobservable characteristics. We estimate a recursive empirical specification consisting of a health production function and reduced forms for the lifestyle equations using Maximum Simulated Likelihood for a multivariate probit model with discrete indicators of lifestyle choices and self-assessed health (SAH) on British panel data from the 1984 and 1991 Health and Lifestyle Survey. We find that prudent drinking and not smoking in 1984 have dramatic positive effects on the probability of reporting excellent or good SAH in 1991. The failure of epidemiological analyses to account for unobserved heterogeneity can explain their low estimates of the relevance of lifestyle in the socio-economic status-health relationship. Accounting for unobserved heterogeneity also leads us to conclude that indicators for sleep, exercise and breakfast in 1984 are unimportant for SAH in 1991.Determinants of health, lifestyles, simulation-based inference, panel data.

The role of child health and economic status in educational, health, and labour market outcomes in young adulthood

The Ontario Child Health Study provides the first opportunity in Canada to assess directly the relationship between socio-economic and health status in childhood and levels of completed schooling, health status, and labour market success in young adulthood. We find that childhood health problems are negatively associated with educational attainment, especially the probability of a university degree, and the health status of young adults. Our results also imply that childhood health problems influence adult labour force outcomes, especially for males, mainly through adult levels of schooling and health.