This paper examines the persistence of bad health among the elderly, and attempts to
identify its determinants. We are particularly interested in the role of recent past bad
health. Using a panel data set from Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS), several health
measures such as poor general health status (poor GHS), hypertension, and low body mass
index (low BMI) are examined. We find that for all health measures, recent past bad health
has a small impact on current bad health once conditioning on individual fixed effects. For
instance, in the case of poor GHS, the elderly with poor GHS in the recent past are only 4%
points more likely to have poor GHS in the subsequent period compared to their
counterparts.