The Shared Non-cognitive Roots of Health and Socioeconomic Status: Evidence from the US

A voluminous literature established a strong relationship between subjective health and
socioeconomic status measures. We test the idea that self-reported health and subjective
socioeconomic status have “shared non-cognitive roots”, i.e., that the same personality traits
significantly affect both status variables, even after controlling for the complex relationships
involving objective and subjective measures across the two domains. To this aim, we estimate
a bivariate model based on longitudinal large-scale data (30,675 observations) from six waves
(2006-2016) of the US Health and Retirement Study. Our findings strongly support our
conjecture, as all the “Big Five” traits are significantly related to self-reported health and
subjective socioeconomic status with the same sign, even after controlling for both objective
measures and once the other subjective measure is considered. These results point to a novel,
direct channel through which non-cognitive factors similarly influence self-evaluations across
distinct, though strongly intertwined, domains.