Diminishing returns to aggregate level studies

摘要

The suggestion that the health of individuals depends on the characteristics of the society in which they live, as well as on their own characteristics, is important. Almost all the empirical work it has prompted has examined the aggregate level relation between income inequality and population mortality. But if the individual level relation between risk of mortality and income is curvilinear at least part of any association between population mortality and income inequality is artefactual in the sense that it could arise even if individual risk was due only to individual income and not to its distribution.