Journal article
The effects of self-assessed health: Dealing with and understanding misclassification bias
L Chen, PM Clarke, DJ Petrie, KE Staub
Journal of Health Economics | Published : 2021
Abstract
Self-assessed health (SAH) is often used in health econometric models as the key explanatory variable or as a control variable. However, there is evidence questioning its test-retest reliability, with up to 30% of individuals changing their response. Building on recent advances in the econometrics of misclassification, we develop a way to consistently estimate and account for misclassification in reported SAH by using data from a large representative longitudinal survey where SAH was elicited twice. From this we gain new insights into the nature of SAH misclassification and its potential for biasing health econometric estimates. The results from applying our approach to nonlinear models of l..
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Awarded by International Association for Applied Econometrics
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank Denzil Fiebig, Bill Griffiths, Mark Harris, Joe Hirschberg, Maarten Lindeboom, Jenny Lye, Frank Windmeijer, Rainer Winkelmann, Eugenio Zuccheli, the participants of the European Workshop on Econometrics and Health Economics (Groningen) , the Asian Meeting of the Econometric Society (Hong Kong) , the China Meeting of the Econometric Society (Wuhan) , the International Association for Applied Econometrics conference (Sapporo) , the Australian Health Economics Society conference (Freemantle, WA) , the Health and Wellbeing Workshop (Werribee, VIC) and seminar participants at Erasmus University for helpful comments. Petrie acknowledges support from the Australian Research Council through grant DE150100309. Staub acknowledges support from the Australian Research Council through grant DE170100644. Alex Ballantyne and Edwin Chan provided excellent research assistance. The names of the authors are listed in alphabetical order.