Health and Socioeconomic Mobility: The Economic Consequences of Changes in Health for Pre-Retirement Workers

The theory of cumulative advantage/disadvantage provides a life-course framework for analyzing stratification systems among the aged. Although income inequality has been the primary focus of this theory, recent studies have examined processes of cumulative disadvantage in terms of health. One consistent finding has been that socioeconomic status has a significant effect on health. Focus here, however, is extended to analyze the opposite - the effect of health on socioeconomic mobility. The first two waves of the Health and Retirement Study are used to estimate the reciprocal effects that exist between health and economic status of the US preretirement working population, specifically, to examine the reciprocal relationships between changes in physical and emotional health, on the one hand, and changes in workforce attachment, earnings, and assets, on the other. Preliminary analyses indicate that, while health and wealth are reciprocally related, among older workers, the association is primarily from health to changes in wealth, and not vice versa. These findings support the cumulative advantage perspective on inequality in old age, and challenge the commonly held view that socioeconomic status is more determinative of health than vice versa.

Health/Socioeconomic Status/Social Mobility

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