Individual Heterogeneity in the Association Between Social Participation and Self-rated Health: A Panel Study on BHPS
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Individual Heterogeneity in the Association Between Social Participation and Self‑rated Health: A Panel Study on BHPS Damiano Fiorillo1 · Giuseppe Lubrano Lavadera2 · Nunzia Nappo3 Accepted: 25 May 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract In the last ten years, interest in social capital as a mechanism for understanding actual and perceived health has been increasing among economists. Although the pathways by which social participation, as a dimension of social capital, may have a positive effect on health seem clearly identified, empirical evidence is mixed because the lack of longitudinal data makes it difficult to deal with individual heterogeneity. Our study investigates the relationship between social participation (as measured by being a member, active, or both a member and active) in associations and self-rated health in a panel setting, using the first five waves of the British Household Panel Survey from 1991 to 1995 (unbalanced panel N = 45,745). To take into account heterogeneity, we implement three different kinds of estimations for fixed effects, two have been largely used in the literature and one method was recently proposed by Baetschmann et al. (J R Stat Soc Ser A 178: 685–703, 2015). We find positive effects but weak significance for active membership. When we control for reverse causality, using lagged independent variables and membership in specific organizations, we obtain more detailed and in some cases significant results. Keywords Self-rated health · Social participation · Individual heterogeneity · Social capital · Ordered logit fixed effects model · British Household Panel Survey JEL Classification C01 · C33 · C35 · H10 · Z10
* Giuseppe Lubrano Lavadera [email protected] Damiano Fiorillo [email protected] Nunzia Nappo [email protected] 1
Univeristà di Napoli Univeristy of Naples Parhenope, Naples, Italy
2
University of Salerno, Salern, Italy
3
Universityof Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy
13
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1 Introduction1 In the last ten years, interest in social capital as a mechanism for understanding actual and perceived health has been increasing among economists (Folland 2006; Scheffler and Brown 2008; Ronconi et al. 2012; Ljunge 2014). In these studies, social capital is commonly referred to as “features of social organization, such as trust, norms and networks that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions” (Putnam 1993, 167). Scholars disaggregate the notion of social capital into cognitive and structural components, with the former related to individuals’ perceptions resulting in values, norms and trust, and the latter representing the extent and intensity of formal and informal social networks (Uphoff 2000; Lochner et al. 2003). Moreover, the literature distinguishes between collective and individual social capital, with the former related to aggregate social relations within a community and the latter indicating the social relations of a particular person (Portes 1998; Kawachi et
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