Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/281669 
Year of Publication: 
2024
Series/Report no.: 
GLO Discussion Paper No. 1384
Publisher: 
Global Labor Organization (GLO), Essen
Abstract: 
Childhood circumstances may impact senior health, prompting this study to introduce novel machine learning methods to assess their individual and collective contributions to health inequality in old age. Using the US Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS), we analyzed health outcomes of American and Chinese participants aged 60 and above. Conditional inference trees and forest were employed to estimate the influence of childhood circumstances on self-rated health (SRH), comparing with the conventional parametric Roemer method. The conventional parametric Roemer method estimated higher IOP in health (China: 0.039, 22.67% of the total Gini coefficient 0.172; US: 0.067, 35.08% of the total Gini coefficient 0.191) than conditional inference tree (China: 0.022, 12.79% of 0.172; US: 0.044, 23.04% of 0.191) and forest (China: 0.035, 20.35% of 0.172; US: 0.054, 28.27% of 0.191). Key determinants of health in old age were identified, including childhood health, family financial status, and regional differences. The conditional inference forest consistently outperformed other methods in predictive accuracy as measured by out-of-sample mean squared error (MSE). The findings demonstrate the importance of early-life circumstances in shaping later health outcomes and stress the earlylife interventions for health equity in aging societies. Our methods highlight the utility of machine learning in public health to identify determinants of health inequality.
Subjects: 
Life Course
Inequality of Opportunity
Childhood Circumstances
Machine Learning
Conditional Inference Tree
Random Forest
JEL: 
I14
J13
J14
O57
C53
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.