Healthy Aging at Older Ages: Are Income and Education Important?

Abstract

Being higher on the socioeconomic scale is correlated with being in better health, but is there is a causal relationship? Using three years of longitudinal data for individuals aged 50 and older from the Canadian Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics, we study the health transitions for those who were in good health in the first year, focussing especially on income and education. The initial good health restriction removes from the sample those whose incomes may have been affected by a previous history of poor health, thus avoiding a well known problem of econometric endogeneity. We then ask, for those in good health, whether later transitions in health status are related to socioeconomic status. We find that they are -- that changes in health status over the subsequent two years are related in particular to income and education.aging, health, income, education