Baker, Michael, Mark Stabile, and Catherine Deri. 2004. "What Do Self-Reported, Objective, Measures of Health Measure?" Journal of Human Resources 39(4): 1067-1093.

Survey reports of the incidence of chronic conditions are considered by many researchers to be more objective, and thus preferable, measures of unobserved health status than self-assessed measures of global well being. In this paper we evaluate this hypothesis by attempting to validate these “objective, self-reported” measures of health. Our analysis makes use of a unique data set that matches a variety of self-reports of health with respondents’ medical records. We find that these measures are subject to considerable response error resulting in large attenuation biases when they are used as explanatory variables.

Michael Baker is a professor of economics at the University of Toronto and a faculty research fellow of the NBER. Mark Stabile is an associate professor of economics at the University of Toronto and a faculty research fellow of the NBER. Catherine Deri is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Ottawa. This is an updated and revised version of Baker, Stabile, and Deri (2001). The authors gratefully acknowledge the research support of SSHRC (Baker, Grant # 410-99-0112), CIHR (Baker and Stabile, Grant # MOP-53133) the Institute for Clinical and Evaluative Sciences (Stabile and Deri). The authors would like to thank John Bound, John Ham, David Cutler, the referees, and seminar participants at various workshops for helpful comments. The data can be obtained through application to the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care.