Internationally comparable health indices
针对国际健康研究中健康指标难以跨国比较的问题，提出一个跨国的健康测量模型，利用身体测量来统一标尺，发现各国健康报告风格差异显著，新指数信度约80%，与收入、财富的相关性比自报健康更强。
One of the most intractable problems in international health research is the lack of comparability of health measures across countries or cultures. We develop a cross-country measurement model for health, in which functional limitations, self-reports of health, and a physical measure are interrelated to construct health indices. To establish comparability across countries, we define the measurement scales by the physical measure while other parameters vary by country to reflect cultural and linguistic differences in response patterns. We find significant cross-country variation in response styles of health reports along with variability in genuine health that is related to differences in national income. Our health indices achieve satisfactory reliability of about 80% and their gradients by age, income, and wealth for the most part show the expected patterns. Moreover, the health indices correlate much more strongly with income and net worth than self-reported health measures.