Search Results
Working Paper
Health Shocks, Health Insurance, Human Capital, and the Dynamics of Earnings and Health
We specify and calibrate a life-cycle model of labor supply and savings incorporating health shocks and medical treatment decisions. Our model features endogenous wage formation via human capital accumulation, employer-sponsored health insurance, and means-tested social insurance. We use the model to study the effects of health shocks on health, labor supply and earnings, and to assess how health shocks contribute to earnings inequality. We also simulate provision of public insurance to agents who lack employer-sponsored insurance. The public insurance program substantially increases medical ...
Journal Article
Making up for lost time: Forging new connections between health and community development
New trends in the today?s public health world are making an important case for bringing public health and community development efforts together. These include the changing nature of 21st century preventable disease, the increasing link between health disparities and place, and the early positive evidence from early adopters of combined health and development strategies. Read about specific examples of efforts from King County, Washington that are capitalizing on these changes and simultaneously advancing both health and community development.
Working Paper
Equilibrium Labor Market Search and Health Insurance Reform
We present and empirically implement an equilibrium labor market search model where risk averse workers facing medical expenditure shocks are matched with firms making health insurance coverage decisions. Our model delivers a rich set of predictions that can account for a wide variety of phenomenon observed in the data including the correlations among firm sizes, wages, health insurance offering rates, turnover rates and workers? health compositions. We estimate our model by Generalized Method of Moments using a combination of micro datasets including Survey of Income and Program ...
Working Paper
Medical Expenses and Saving in Retirement: The Case of U.S. and Sweden
Many U.S. households have significant wealth late in life, contrary to the predictions of a simple life-cycle model. In this paper, we document stark differences between U.S. and Sweden regarding out-of-pocket medical and long-term-care expenses late in life, and use them to investigate their role in discouraging the elderly from dissaving. Using a consumption-saving model in retirement with significant uninsurable expense risk, we find that medical expense risk accounts for a quarter of the U.S.-Sweden difference in retirees' dissaving patterns. Furthermore, medical expense risk affects ...
Working Paper
Intergenerational Health Mobility in the US
Studies of intergenerational mobility have largely ignored health despite the central importance of health to welfare. We present the first estimates of intergenerational health mobility in the US by using repeated measures of self-reported health status (SRH) during adulthood from the PSID. Our main finding is that there is substantially greater health mobility than income mobility in the US. A possible explanation is that social institutions and policies are more effective at disrupting intergenerational health transmission than income transmission. We further show that health and income ...
Working Paper
Inequality and Mortality: New Evidence from U.S. County Panel Data
A large body of past research, looking across countries, states, and metropolitan areas, has found positive and statistically significant associations between income inequality and mortality. By contrast, in recent years more robust statistical methods using larger and richer data sources have generally pointed to little or no relationship between inequality and mortality. This paper aims both to document how methodological shortcomings tend to positively bias this statistical association and to advance this literature by estimating the inequality-mortality relationship. We use a ...
Journal Article
Healthy food financing initiatives: Increasing access to fresh foods in underserved markets
The Fresh Food Financing Initiative in Philadelphia serves the financing needs of supermarket operators that plan to operate in underserved communities that may have limited access to affordable, healthy foods. Through successful partnerships, the Fresh Food Financing Initiative is being replicated across the country and the President?s 2011 budget proposal includes over $400 million for a national Healthy Food Financing Initiative.
Working Paper
What do happiness and health satisfaction data tell us about relative risk aversion?
In this paper we provide estimates of the coefficient of relative risk aversion using information on self-reports of subjective personal well-being from the 2006 Gallup World Poll. We expand the existing literature on the use of happiness data to analyze economic issues by considering the implications of allowing for health state dependence in the utility function. Our estimates of relative risk aversion using pooled data from various country groupings are smaller than one, suggesting less concavity than log utility. We also find that controlling for health dependence generally reduces these ...
Journal Article
Policy update: Money for marrow?
Related links:https://www.richmondfed.org/-/media/richmondfedorg/publications/research/econ_focus/2012/q1/policy_update_weblinks.cfm
Working Paper
Predicting health behaviors with economic preferences and perceived control
We present new evidence on the relationship between health behaviors and experimental measures of risk and time preferences and introduce evidence that perceived control ? a measure incorporated from the health psychology literature ? is a stronger and more consistent predictor of health behaviors than economic preferences.