Healthiness, Education, and Marital Status

In this paper we use data from the Retirement History Survey (RHS) to examine the relationship of some sociodemographic and economic variables to morbidity and mortality. Since the RHS is a longitudinal survey, we are able to study current health conditioned on prior health as well as the more usual unconditioned estimates. We find that health is related to education and marital status though the marital effects are much weaker when we condition for prior health. These effects persist when we control for income and use of medical facilities. An interesting finding is that married men seem to persist in the state of poor health rather than dying.