Self-assessed health, reference levels, and mortality

Abstract

the article studies the relationship between self-assessed health (SAH) and subsequent mortality in the German Socio-Economic Panel. Specifically, I examine whether socio-economic characteristics of respondents have an effect on mortality, conditional on SAH. Such conditional effects are shown to exist for various covariates, including age, income and wealth. These findings question the comparability of SAH across different socio-economic groups.