ABSTRACT The well-known Income Inequality Hypothesis suggests that income disparities in a country are detrimental for people's health. Empirical studies testing this hypothesis so far have found mixed results. In this study, we argue that a reason for these mixed findings may be that high national income inequality mostly harms individuals with high levels of social trust. We employ data of the World Value Survey and European Value Survey, using information on 393,761 respondents within 89 countries. Multilevel regression analyses, across countries and within countries across time, confirm findings from earlier studies that there is a negative association between national income inequality and self-rated health. Our results also reveal that national income inequality is especially detrimental for trustful citizens: while the effect of income inequality is nearly absent among people with low social trust it is negative among people with high social trust.

ABSTRACT This study examines to what extent the often found association between marital status and self-assessed health is influenced by the marital composition of the country people live in. Four hypotheses explaining why the national marital status composition may be influential are derived and tested. Whereas earlier research in this field solely focused on divorce rates, this study includes six different indicators of the national marital status composition to provide a comprehensive test of our expectations. We employ data on 29 European countries (European Social Survey 2002, 2004, and 2006, N =97,797). Multilevel regression analyses demonstrate that both the strength of the relationship between marital status and health, and which unmarried group is most disadvantaged, vary across European countries. Living in a country with a high proportion of married people appears to be beneficial to the health of never married persons, but detrimental for widowed people. Additionally, our findings contradict the argument that divorced, widowed, and never married persons may be best off when living in countries with high proportions of people who are in the same situation. Finally, our results show that the never married are worst off in countries with a high proportion of cohabitants. This may reflect stronger health selectivity into cohabitation in countries where cohabitation is more common. We conclude that the ways through which the marital status composition influences the association between marital status and health appear to be complex and highly dependent on the exact marital status groups that are examined.