Ninth International Conference on Health, Wellness & Society

Abstract

Our paper aims at contributing to the literature on socioeconomic determinants of health by investigating the impact of both over-education and under-education on both subjective and objective health outcomes of employees - self-assessed health (SAH) and hypertension. We conduct a longitudinal gender-specific analysis on the data from the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS-HSE) (2000-2014) and estimate dynamic correlated random effects ordered probit and probit models for SAH and hypertension, respectively. Our results provide evidence that both over-education and under-education are related to our objective health measure but the effect can only be observed for the male sub-sample. On the contrary, no impact of educational mismatch on SAH is observed for both gender groups. Due to the lack of consistency between the estimates for subjective and objective health outcomes, we make the hypothesis that SAH might be affected by the issue of reporting heterogeneity. To test this hypothesis, we adopt the method of hierarchical ordered probit (HOPIT) estimation with externally collected vignettes, proposed by Harris et al. (2015). Since the RLMS-HSE does not contain vignettes, we merge the RLMS-HSE (2005) with the country-specific vignettes for Russia from the World Health Survey (2003). Our findings from estimated ordered probit and hierarchical ordered probit (HOPIT) models suggest that reporting heterogeneity might be the issue why we observe the effect of mismatch on the objective measure of health, but not on the self-reported one.