Is the Distribution of Cardiovascular Risks Really Improving ? A Robust Analysis for France.

In this paper, we appraise the recent evolution of the distribution of individuals’ risk of cardiovascular diseases (CVD) in France among both men and women using new normative criteria. An individual risk of CVD is described by a probability of getting such a disease. Building on the framework of Gravel and Tarroux (2015), we assume that individuals, who differ by their income, have Von Neuman-Morgenstern (VNM) preferences over such risks. We appeal to Harsanyi’s aggregation theorem to provide empirically implementable dominance criteria that coincide with the unanimity, taken over a large class of such individual preferences, of anonymous and Pareto-inclusive VNM social rankings of distributions of individuals’ risk of CVD. The implementable criteria that we obtain are Sequential headcount poverty dominance and Sequential headcount affluence dominance. We apply these criteria to the distribution of cardiovascular risks among French men and women on the 2006-2010 period. Probabilities of CVD are assigned to individuals on the basis of a logit model estimated on both the men and the women samples for each of the two years. Our main empirical result is that men and women were differently affected by evolution in the distribution of CVD risks between 2006 and 2010. Specifically, the distribution improved for women but did not improve for men.