The causal effect of income on health: evidence from German reunification

Abstract

We investigate whether there was a causal effect of income changes on the health satisfaction of East and West Germans in the years following reunification. Our data source is the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) between 1984 and 2002, and we fit a recently proposed fixed-effects ordinal estimator to our health measures and use a causal decomposition technique to account for panel attrition. We find evidence of a significant positive effect of income changes on health satisfaction, but the quantitative size of this effect is small. This is the case with respect to current income and a measure of 'permanent' income.