Maynou, Laia 
ORCID: 0000-0002-0447-2959, Saez, Marc and López-Casasnovas, Guillem
(2024)
Association of income and wealth with self-reported health status: analysis of European countries during the financial crisis.
Hacienda Publica Espanola-review of Public Economics, 249.
pp. 181-210.
ISSN 0210-1173
(In Press)
Abstract
Objectives. We evaluate the association between changes in income and wealth (both, real estate and financial wealth, gross and net) and self-perceived health for European Union countries, using a longitudinal sample of individuals before and after the financial crisis. Methods. We estimated generalized linear mixed models, with a binomial response and a logistic link, for three waves of the Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) (2011, 2015, 2017), adjusting for family and individual heterogeneity and for temporal trends. Results. We observe that overall variations in income have a positive and significant impact on changes in self-perceived health during the financial crisis, but not after 2015 (expansion period). As a result, changes in income are important in protecting health during crisis periods. We do not observe an effect of changes in wealth. When comparing the results by country, our findings still hold for most of them, with income being the main driving force behind better self-perceived health. These results are important because changes in individuals’ income seem to be more important than net wealth, and are differently affected by the shocks in the economic crisis. Minor effects in changes of net wealth can be found just for the Netherlands and Germany. Conclusions. We find that, despite the fact that the financial crisis affected European countries differently, in most of them, income, rather than wealth, played an important role in protecting health. However, changes in income were 3 not relevant in the expansion period. Wealth variation in all the specification types proves to have minor or no effect
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