The evolution of health over the life cycle

Abstract

We construct a unified objective measure of health status: the frailty index, defined as the cumulative sum of all adverse health indicators observed for an individual. First, we show that the frailty index has several advantages over self-reported health status, particularly when studying health dynamics. Then we estimate a stochastic process for frailty dynamics over the life cycle. We find that the autocovariance structure of frailty in panel data strongly supports a process that allows the conditional variance of frailty shocks to increase with age. Our frailty measure and dynamic process can be used by researchers to study the evolution of health over the life cycle and its economic implications.

Disability insurance and the effects of return-to-work policies

“…Seehttps://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/wca-limited-capabilitywork-assessment-descriptors for details.17 This distribution is consistent with the finding ofHosseini et al (2021) on the life-cycle dynamic of a frailty index built using PSID data.…”

The economics of longevity – An introduction

“…Secondly, it enables a greater modelling of inequalities and the considerable diversity in how people age (Hosseini, Kopecky and Zhao (2022)).…”

Impact of infectious disease pandemics on individual lifetime consumption: An endogenous time preference approach

“… Dalgaard and Strulik (2014) were among the earliest to view the frailty index with these characteristics as a comprehensive measure of human health status and to introduce it into economic analysis. More recently, Hosseini et al (2022) proposed their own frailty index, compared it with self-reported health status, and reported interesting results showing significant differences in the ability to predict health outcomes. An important point about the health damage variable is that it reflects so-called senescence, even though it is partly related to normal aging.…”