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Author: Rangel-Gonzalez, Erick
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Rangel-Gonzalez, Erick |
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Do Mexican Americans Have a Relative Advantage in Health? Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, The Ohio State University, 2005 Cohort(s): NLSY79 Publisher: Department of Economics, The Ohio State University Keyword(s): Ethnic Differences; Health Factors; Health/Health Status/SF-12 Scale; Hispanics; Morbidity Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. Previous studies found a health advantage of Mexican Americans over non-Hispanic whites after controlling for socioeconomic factors and other elements. This health advantage has been considered as a paradox because Mexican Americans live in more disadvantaged environments and present lower levels of income and human capital than non-Hispanic whites. In order to analyze this paradox I estimate a health production function using physical and mental morbidity as health outcomes to study how human capital, socioeconomic status, health risk behaviors, relative deprivation and social relations affect the health of Mexican Americans and non-Hispanic whites. My results indicate that after controlling for individual health related behaviors, socioeconomic status, relative deprivation (regardless of the relevant reference group) and social relations; there is no difference in physical morbidity between Mexican Americans and non-Hispanic whites. However, I find an advantage on mental health outcomes for Mexican Americans over non-Hispanic whites after controlling for all these factors. After controlling for endogeneity of health endowments, none of the three health related behaviors (smoking, obesity and performing physical activities) affected mental morbidity. However obesity had a huge negative impact on physical morbidity. I found no evidence of a direct impact of education on physical and mental morbidity. However, I found strong evidence of education affecting health related behaviors. I also found evidence suggesting a protective effect of marriage on mental morbidity. The effects of log per capita income on health disappear when introducing relative deprivation. I also found that relative deprivation has a negative direct impact on mental morbidity for Mexican Americans and non-Hispanic whites. My results also show that relative deprivation affects directly the physical morbidity of Mexican Americans but it does not affect the health related behaviors of this population. In contrast, relative deprivation has no direct impact on physical morbidity of non-Hispanic whites but it has an indirect effect by modifying the health related behaviors of this population. I was not able to determine which is the relevant reference group for Mexican Americans. Finally, I found no evidence suggesting that social relations or social cohesion affect the health of Mexican Americans. |
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Bibliography Citation
Rangel-Gonzalez, Erick. Do Mexican Americans Have a Relative Advantage in Health? Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, The Ohio State University, 2005. |