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Background: Disparities in mortality have been firmly established across occupational grades and the incomes they earn, but this line of research has failed to include individuals' relationships to capital, as suggested by class analysists., Methods: According to Wright's classification, the research generated 10 mutually exclusive classes based on occupation and investment income: worker; capitalist worker; professional; capitalist professional; supervisor; capitalist supervisor; manager; capitalist manager; self-employed; and capitalist self-employed. The study participants (n=268 239) were randomly selected from the Statistics Finland population database and represent 33% of Finnish men aged 30-64 years. The mortality data were monitored over the 1995-2014 period., Results: The sociodemographic-adjusted HRs for mortality were lowest for capitalist managers (HR 0.50; 95% CI 0.36 to 0.69) as compared with that for workers without a capitalist class advantage. A positive occupational class gradient was found from managers to supervisors to workers. The capitalist class advantage independently affected the disparities in mortality within this occupational hierarchy., Conclusion: Different occupational class locations protect against premature death differently, and the capitalist class advantage widens the premature-death disparities among the occupational classes. To monitor and explain social inequalities in health in a more nuanced way, future research on investment income as well as the operationalisation of the capitalist class advantage is encouraged., Competing Interests: Competing interests: None declared., (© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2020. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.)

This article builds on recent work that has explored how welfare regimes moderate social class inequalities in health. It extends research to date by using longitudinal data from the EU-SILC (2003-2010) and examines how the relationship between social class and self-reported health and chronic conditions varies across 23 countries, which are split into five welfare regimes (Nordic, Anglo-Saxon, Eastern, Southern, and Continental). Our analysis finds that health across all classes was only worse in Eastern Europe (compared with the Nordic countries). In contrast, we find evidence that the social class gradient in both measures of health was significantly wider in the Anglo-Saxon and Southern regimes. We suggest that this evidence supports the notion that welfare regimes continue to explain differences in health according to social class location. We therefore argue that although downward pressures from globalization and neoliberalism have blurred welfare regime typologies, the Nordic model may continue to have an important mediating effect on class-based inequalities in health.