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abstract  by Arie Kapteyn, James P. Smith and Arthur van Soest
To analyze the effect of health on work, many studies use a
simple self-assessed health measure based upon a question such
as “do you have an impairment or health problem limiting the
kind or amount of work you can do?” A possible drawback of such
a measure is the possibility that different groups of
respondents may use different response scales. This is commonly
referred to as “differential item functioning” (DIF). A specific
form of DIF is justification bias: to justify the fact that they
don’t work, non-working respondents may classify a given health
problem as a more serious work limitation than working
respondents. In this paper we use anchoring vignettes to
identify justification bias and other forms of DIF across
countries and socio-economic groups among older workers in the
U.S. and Europe. Generally, we find differences in response
scales across countries, partly related to