Showing papers by "Buhong Zheng published in 2011"

A new approach to measure socioeconomic inequality in health

Abstract: This paper introduces a new approach to rank and measure socioeconomic inequality in health. A novel feature of the approach is the use of an income-health matrix that relates socioeconomic class with health status; each row of the matrix corresponds to a socioeconomic class and contains the respective probability distribution of health. By invoking a monotone assumption on the income-health matrix, which is a direct translation of the well-known hypothesis of social gradients in health outcomes, we derive a set of welfare-dominance and inequality-dominance conditions for ranking health distributions. Unlike other existing health inequality measures, our conditions require no cardinal specification of ordinal heath data and, hence, are robust. We then apply the dominance conditions to compare socioeconomic health inequality in the US and Canada using the newly released JCUSH data.

Consistent comparison of pro-poor growth

Abstract: This article contributes to the literature of pro-poor growth measurement by introducing and characterizing a growth-rate consistency axiom. The axiom states that if one growth pattern is judged to be more pro-poor than another growth pattern at a given growth rate, then the pro-poor ranking between the two growth patterns should remain the same at a higher growth rate. We show that summary pro-poor measures such as poverty-growth elasticities may violate this axiom. We then characterize a special dominance condition under which a given summary pro-poor measure will satisfy the growth-rate consistency axiom. Finally, we establish a general growth-rate dominance condition under which all summary pro-poor measures will respect the growth-rate consistency axiom.

Flight Delays and Passenger Preferences: An Axiomatic Approach

Abstract: The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) defines a flight as “delayed” if it arrives 15+ minutes late. The DOT “flight counting” delay definition is used to rank airline/airport service quality. An obvious caveat of counting flight delays is that the duration of delay plays no role in the delay count. The purpose of this article is to propose an aggregate delay measure that is sensitive to the distribution of time delayed among passengers. The importance of this work is that our derived delay measure reflects passenger preferences rather than the arbitrary delay cutoff established by the DOT. We model passengers' preference ordering using the criteria that passengers prefer fewer, shorter, and more equal delay times.

Decomposing the Intergenerational Disparity in Income and Obesity

Abstract: Intergenerational disparity in income and health violates the norm of equal opportunity and deserves the attention of researchers and policy makers. To understand changes in intergenerational disparity, we created the intergenerational mobility index (IMI), which can simultaneously measure changes in income rankings and in health outcomes across two generations. We selected obesity as one health outcome to illustrate the application of IMI due to its severe health and financial consequences for society and the significant changes in the distribution of obesity across income groups. Although obesity has increased in all income groups in the last four decades, higher income groups have tended to have a faster increase in obesity, which has reduced the disparity in obesity across income groups. The strength of our intergenerational approach within families is to control the genetic influence, which is one of the strongest determinants of obesity. The decomposition of the IMI illustrates that it captures changes in obesity distribution (holding constant income rankings between generations) and changes in income rankings (holding constant the obesity distribution across generations), simultaneously. We used the data of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), which have been collected since 1967, is the longest longitudinal survey in the U.S. The PSID surveyed respondents’ height and weight were recorded in 1986 and from 1999 to 2007. We selected respondents from 1986 as the parental generation and respondents from 2007 as the adult children’s generation. To make the adult children’s body weight status and income comparable to their parents’, we stratified the analysis by gender. For the pairs of fathers and adult sons, we found the intergenerational disparity in overweight, a less severe indicator of excessive fatness, across income was decreasing. This was partially due to the up-swing in the adult children’s income status. For the pairs of mothers and adult daughters, we found a similar decrease in socioeconomic disparity in obesity. However, decomposition of the IMI indicated that changes in income distributions between mothers and adult daughters contributed smaller effects than that between fathers and adult sons. Our study has demonstrated that the IMI and its decomposition are useful tools for analyzing intergenerational disparity in income and health.