This dissertation is comprised of three essays, the goals of which are to provide an empirical understanding of how the income-health relationship evolves with child age and the underlying mechanisms. Previous research, conducted in US and Canadian settings, has found a positive association between household income and child health, which strengthens with age. One reason for this relationship may be that low-income children are more likely to suffer from chronic conditions than high-income children. While US research has controlled for the effects of parental health when examining the gradient, Canadian work has not. In Chapter 1, we seek to determine whether the Canadian findings persist after controlling for parental health status. Our results show that this adjustment reduces the size of the gradient in childhood and, importantly, indicates that it does not increase with age. In Chapter 2, we contribute to this literature by applying more flexible estimation techniques, namely nonparametric models, to understand the gradient in childhood. Our results provide evidence that our nonparametric model is closer to the true data generating process than the parametric model. Furthermore, our estimates confirm that the gradient does not increase with age, regardless of whether we control for parental health. In Chapter 3, we examine the relationship between family income, chronic conditions and child health. Generally, our results suggest that income does not have a significant impact on chronic conditions. Furthermore, we do not find the effect of chronic conditions on the probability of being in poor health differs by income levels, with the exception of asthma and mental handicap. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/16599 |
| Date | 10 1900 |
| Creators | de Oliveira, Claire |
| Contributors | Spencer, Byron G., Denton, Frank T., Dooley, Martin D., Racine, Jeffrey S., Economics |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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