Self-assessed health, reference levels, and mortality

Abstract

The paper studies the relationship between self-assessed health 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 self-assessed health. Such conditional effects are shown to exist for various covariates, including age, income, and wealth. These findings question the comparability of self-assessed health across different socio-economic groups.