Healthy aging at older ages: are income and education important?

Being higher on the socio-economic scale is correlated with being in better health, but is there is a causal relationship? Using 3 years of longitudinal data for individuals aged 50 and older from the Canadian Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics, we study the health transitions for those who were in good health in the first year, focusing especially on income and education. The initial good health restriction removes from the sample those whose incomes may have been affected by a previous history of poor health, thus avoiding a well-known problem of econometric endogeneity. We then ask, for those in good health, whether later transitions in health status are related to socio-economic status. We find that they are-that changes in health status over the subsequent 2 years are related, in particular, to income and education.