The Survey on Health, Aging and Wealth

Abstract

Until very recently, health information has been mostly absent from Italian surveys of household budgets and economic conditions. Interest in the association between health outcomes, economic resources and labor market conditions has led us to fill the gap with new microeconomic data. The product of this collective effort is the Survey on Health, Aging and Wealth (SHAW). The survey was commissioned to DOXA, a leading Italian polling agency with considerable experience in the field. The questionnaire is patterned after the US Health and Retirement Survey and the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) project, and covers a range of matters bearing on the relations between health and wealth, aging and wealth, health and retirement. The population sampled is representative of the Italian population over 50. Some of the questions refer to the household (for instance, assets). Others are posed to all 2627 household members. More detailed questions on health status, job outcomes and expectations of future events are asked only to the respondent and spouse, 1765 individuals in total (1068 heads and 697 spouses). These characteristics of the survey make SHAW a unique source for studying the relation between socioeconomic status, health outcomes and health care utilization.