Reporting error in weight and height among older adults: Implications for estimating healthcare costs

Publication date: Available online 14 October 2016 Source:The Journal of the Economics of Ageing Author(s): John Cawley, Johanna Catherine Maclean, Asia Sikora Kessler Previous research has identified obesity as a major contributor to healthcare costs among older adults. A limitation of this literature is its reliance on self-reported measures of weight and height, which may contain substantial error that can lead to bias in estimates of obesity prevalence and coefficients in healthcare utilization regressions. This paper estimates the extent of reporting error in weight and height among older adults, and examines its implications for estimating healthcare costs within this population. Moreover, this paper is the first to apply methods to correct for reporting error in weight and height to an older adult sample, and examine the extent to which these methods reduce bias from reporting error. Previous research on reporting error in weight has focused on working-age adults, but older adults are likely to have different patterns of misreporting due to declines in cognition, changes in body composition, and other age-related factors. We find substantial error in older adults’ reports of weight and height, and this error is neither classical nor independent of common regressors in econometric models. Use of self-reports leads to bias in estimates of mean BMI, obesity prevalence, coefficients in healthcare utilization regressions, and obesity-attributable healthcare costs. Co...
Source: The Journal of the Economics of Ageing - Category: Health Management Source Type: research