The Hispanic health paradox for older Americans: an empirical note.

Previous researchers have found that Hispanic immigrants tend to have better health than could be reasonably explained by their socioeconomic status and other demographic variables. The main objective of this study is to re-investigate the Hispanic health paradox covering the period from 1992 to 2012. Main contributions of the paper include using a data set of older Americans from the Health and Retirement Study. More importantly, we use two new measures of health. Previous research on the paradox had primarily used mortality or morbidity to measure health. In contrast, the HRS includes a measure of self-reported poor health from which we construct a latent health variable. Using both poor health and latent health we find that even among our sample of older Americans that Hispanic Immigrants remain more healthy than could be explained by their socioeconomic status and their other health inputs.

The U.S. health production function: evidence from 2001 to 2009.

This study estimates the impact of the 2007 financial crisis upon U.S. health as measured by age adjusted death rates. OLS regression results suggest that the average death rate was lower in the post-crisis period than the pre-crisis period. The majority of the average decline in the death rate was a result of the time period and not a result of changes in the values of the underlying explanatory variables. We continue to find this result even adding state fixed effects. Contrary to other research, we find that the unemployment rate has no statistically significant impact on death rates either for the U.S. as a whole or for any states individually. Rather, the impact of the financial crisis is felt via year fixed effects that increased over time during the post-crisis period.