Does early-life income inequality predict self-reported health in later life? Evidence from the United States.

We investigate the association between adult health and the income inequality they experienced as children up to 80 years earlier. Our inequality data track shares of national income held by top percentiles from 1913 to 2009. We average those data over the same early-life years and merge them to individual data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics data for 1984-2009. Controlling for demographic and economic factors, we find both men and women are statistically more likely to report poorer health if income was more unequally distributed during the first years of their lives. The association is robust to alternative specifications of income inequality and time trends and remains significant even when we control for differences in overall childhood health. Our results constitute prima facie evidence that adults' health may be adversely affected by the income inequality they experienced as children.

Effect of postsecondary education on the economic status of persons who are deaf or hard of hearing.

This article examines the effect that postsecondary education has on earnings and the duration of time spent in the Social Security disability programs for young persons who are deaf or hard of hearing. Our hypothesis is that investments in postsecondary training increase the likelihood of employment for persons who are deaf or hard of hearing and thus reduce dependency on disability-related income support programs. A longitudinal data set based upon records from the National Technical Institute for the Deaf and Social Security administrative records is used for this analysis. We find that those who graduate, even those who graduate with vocational degrees, experience significant earnings benefits and reductions in the duration of time spent on federal disability programs when compared with those who do not graduate with a degree. This finding suggests that reductions in the duration of time spent on Social Security programs are not limited to those with the highest level of scholastic aptitude and that investments in post-secondary education can benefit a broad group of deaf and hard-of-hearing persons. In addition, the data show that individuals who attend college, but withdraw before graduation, fair no better economically than individuals who never attended college.

The timing of the rise in U.S. obesity varies with measure of fatness.

There are several ways to measure fatness and obesity, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. The primary measure for tracking the prevalence of obesity has historically been body mass index (BMI). This paper compares long-run trends in the prevalence of obesity when obesity is defined using skinfold thickness instead of BMI, using data from the full series of U.S. National Health Examination Surveys. The results indicate that when one uses skinfold thickness rather than BMI to define obesity, the rise in the prevalence of obesity is detectable 10-20 years earlier. This underscores the importance of examining multiple measures of fatness when monitoring or otherwise studying obesity.

Adding biomeasures relating to fatness and obesity to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics.

The pace of research on the causes and consequences of obesity has increased dramatically since the late 1990s. However, a great chasm exists between the high-quality measurements of fatness used in the medical literature and the mostly self-reported height and weight data found in social science surveys. This article discusses the scientific value of including more accurate measures of fatness in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). It describes why fatness and obesity are of interest to PSID users, the concepts they measure, the strengths and weaknesses of alternative biomeasures for these concepts, the value added of including each in the PSID, and their synergies with the PSID structure. Although no single measure of fatness is ideal for every situation, given scarce PSID resources we recommend adding waist circumference, percentage of body fat, total body fat, and fat free mass through a method such as bioelectrical impedance analysis, as well as determining genetic predisposition to obesity.

Beyond BMI: the value of more accurate measures of fatness and obesity in social science research.

Virtually all social science research related to obesity studies a person's body mass index (BMI). Yet there is wide agreement in the medical literature that BMI is seriously flawed because it does not distinguish fat from fat-free mass such as muscle and bone. This paper studies data that include multiple measures of fatness and finds that many important patterns, such as who is classified as obese, group rates of obesity, and correlations of obesity with social science outcomes, are all sensitive to the measure of fatness and obesity used. We show that, relative to percent body fat, BMI misclassifies substantial fractions of individuals as obese or non-obese; in general, BMI is less accurate classifying men than women. Furthermore, when percent body fat instead of BMI is used to define obesity, the gap in obesity between white and African American men increases substantially but the gap in obesity between African American and white women is cut in half. Finally, total body fat is negatively correlated with employment for some groups and fat-free mass is not significantly correlated with employment for any group, a difference that was obscured in previous research that studied BMI. In the long run, social science datasets should include more accurate measures of fatness. In the short run, estimating more accurate measures of fatness using height and weight is not possible except by making unattractive assumptions, but there is also no reason to adhere uncritically to BMI as a measure of fatness. Social science research on obesity would be enriched by greater consideration of alternate specifications of weight and height and more accurate measures of fatness.

How postsecondary education improves adult outcomes for Supplemental Security Income children with severe hearing impairments.

The rapid growth in the number of children participating in the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program before the age of 18 has led policymakers to consider new methods of assisting children with disabilities in their transition from school to work. Postsecondary education represents one path that SSI children may take to acquire the skills necessary to enter employment and reduce dependency on the SSI disability program as adults. Yet little is known about SSI children's experience with postsecondary education, let alone their ability to increase their labor market earnings and reduce their time on SSI as adults in the long term. This lack of information on long-term outcomes is due in part to a lack of longitudinal data. This article uses a unique longitudinal data set to conduct a case study of SSI children who applied for postsecondary education at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) within the Rochester Institute of Technology. The data set was created by merging NTID administrative data on the characteristics and experiences of its applicants to Social Security Administration (SSA) longitudinal data on earnings and program participation. We used this data file to estimate the likelihood that an SSI child will graduate from NTID relative to other hearing-impaired NTID applicants, and we estimated the influence of graduation from NTID on participation in the SSI adult program and later success in the labor market. The results of our analysis show that the percentage of NTID applicants who were SSI children increased over time, from a low of 10 percent in 1982 to more than 41 percent in 2000. However, the differences in the probability of graduation from NTID between deaf SSI children and deaf applicants who were not SSI children did not change accordingly. The probability of graduation for SSI children who applied to NTID was 13.5 percentage points lower than for those who were not SSI children. The estimated disparity indicates that targeting college retention programs toward SSI children may be an effective way to improve overall graduation rates. Our results also show that SSI children who graduated from NTID spent less time in the SSI adult program and had higher earnings than SSI children who did not gradu- ate. Compared with SSI children who were accepted to NTID but chose not to attend, SSI children who graduated from NTID left the SSI program 19 months earlier, were less likely to reenter the program, and at age 30 had increased their earnings by an estimated 49 percent. Our findings demonstrate that SSI children need not be relegated to a lifetime of SSI participation as adults, despite the poor overall labor market experience of this population since the creation of the SSI program in 1974.

Until death do us part: an analysis of the economic well-being of widows in four countries.

OBJECTIVE: Our objective was to show how a woman's economic well-being changes in the United States, Germany, Great Britain, and Canada after her husband's death and the importance of public and private income sources in offsetting the economic consequences of that death. METHODS: With data from the Cross-National Equivalent File, we used event history analysis to track changes in the social security replacement rate and the more comprehensive total income replacement rate for women and to show how these changes vary across age and household income quintiles within and across countries. RESULTS: There were substantial differences across the countries in how income from specific sources changes, especially with respect to the mix of income from government and private sources, but the overall across-country pattern of total income replacement rates was remarkably similar both in size and in distribution across age and the woman's place in the income distribution prior to her husband's death. DISCUSSION: Studies that focus on a social security replacement rate will seriously understate the actual total income replacement rate of women following a husband's death. This will especially be the case in countries like the United States where private sources of income play a more important role in income replacement.

Self-reported work-limitation data: what they can and cannot tell us.

Despite their widespread use in the literature, the Current Population Survey (CPS) and similar surveys have come under attack of late. We put the criticisms in perspective by systematically examining what the CPS data can and cannot be used for in disability research compared to the National Health Interview Survey. On the basis of our findings, we argue (1) that the CPS can be used to monitor trends in outcomes of those with disabilities and (2) that the dramatic decline in the employment of people with disabilities we describe in the CPS during the 1990s is not an artifact of the data.